The other day I found myself poring over this Google map. Each red dot marks a place I’ve visited in the past four years. Google has been watching me.
Some places don’t count: in Seoul I was in transit to Busan, in Salt Lake City we were on our way to Palm Springs, and in Amsterdam I was in transit to Edinburgh or Newcastle upon Tyne.
You can see dense clusters of red dots. Of course the densest cluster is Minneapolis where I live, but there are clusters in the northeast of England where I grew up, Hawaii, and Japan. These are important physical locations in the place where I live. Place is complicated.
In each of the past four years I made separate trips to both Europe and Asia. This week I found myself wondering what it would mean to aggregate the separate journeys. What would a round-the-world journey look like?
Each year, my overseas journeys are some variant on this:
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| MSP-HNL-NRT-HNL, MSP-AMS-NCL-AMS-MSP: 22,723 miles. |
I can make the same stopovers with a route that circles the globe:
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| MSP-HNL-NRT-AMS-NCL-AMS-MSP: 18,412 miles. |
This circular route is over 4,000 miles shorter and provides opportunities for stopovers in Asia.
I sometimes toy with traveling on a round-the-world (RTW) ticket. An RTW ticket allows you to circle the globe while making several stopovers for a fixed price.
RTW fares used to be a good value but these days they seem expensive, starting around $5,000 in coach. Competition from budget airlines and reasonably priced one-way fares make RTW’s less attractive for the type of journey I’m planning.
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| Tokyo Narita to Amsterdam Schiphol, ¥39,610 (USD$379) |
Google is watching me. Already, advertisements on Web pages reflect and build on my searches. They scream “Business Class to Mumbai for $3,500” and other suggestive sells.
In the coming weeks, as I receive daily radiation therapy to hopefully eradicate the last vestiges of my prostate cancer, I’ll be playing around with different itineraries.
Once I know I can travel comfortably, I’ll make a round-the-world itinerary real.
