Fancy seeing y’all here.
A month on one chart. The thin thread is the route; the stain is time — every place we lingered burns darker. Toggle to photos and the stain moves: not where we slept, but where the cameras came out. Dashed lines are the flights.
13,750 mi. That is 55% of the way around the equator, or nearly five crossings of the United States, covered in thirty-four days by eleven people who then became six.
The same trip, ranked two ways. Flying is 76% of the distance and 13% of the time. Walking is 0.7% of the distance and 40% of the time.
Kilometres per day, log scale — the Atlantic would otherwise flatten every other bar. Travel days spike; hub days murmur; one day is silent.
The outermost fix in each direction, and what happened to be there.
The first town in France liberated on D-Day. The trip never got further north than the church square with the paratrooper on the steeple.
Four hours off the overnight from Charlotte, on the coast road heading north out of Rome. Day one was also the furthest south the trip ever went.
The Frecciarossa’s final curve into Rome from Florence. The eastern edge of the whole month is a railway cutting.
Among the standing stones in Brittany — 5,500 megaliths, older than Stonehenge, raised for reasons no one has ever decoded. The far end of the line.
Corner to corner: 528 mi north to south, 762 mi east to west. Every one of those extremes was set on a different leg of the trip.
Every distinct spot we stayed long enough to count as a visit — one stroke per place, in the order first arrived, height by hours spent (log). Beds tower; lunches flicker.
Everything below was stood in, under, or beside on this trip — plotted by the age of the thing itself, log scale. The itinerary jumped eras daily; laid out straight, it runs from a hand-painted aurochs to a landing beach — and nothing the trip stood in is younger than 1944.
Thirty-three nights away — where we actually woke up, not where the bookings said — and the door that ends it.
28 June. The transatlantic, then a 199 mi coastal drive north out of Rome to the Tuscan hub. Landed 10:20 AM, arrived after dark.
22 July. Not one movement segment recorded all day — the villa planning meeting, the grocery haul, the gate-fob recon. The exhale.
4,793 mi from the house in Charlotte, set on the train into Roma Termini — the same fix that marks the eastern corner of the month.
8 July, 07:54. The Bordeaux hub to Sarlat, timed to land before the Wednesday market closed at one.
2 July in Rome — Termini to Prati to Trastevere and back, 137 minutes, on the day the group arrived from Florence.
24 July, 13:34 to 21:08 inside a sovereign state of 0.81 sq mi, ending on the 21:06 train that shaped the whole evening.
27 July, 11:27, phone-reported, on the A8 west of Agay during the Riviera → Arles run.
United States, Italy, France, Monaco. Two of them share the euro; one of them you can walk across in an afternoon.