This blog has been brilliant at helping me express the experiences we’ve had, making it simple to share stories, and will hopefully form a record we can relish for years after this trip ends.

But where’s the data? I also want the time, distance and costs. Photos and feelings are all well and good, but also give me some cold, hard numbers.

A year long adventure. What an opportunity for a nerd to collect, visualise and share lots of figures.

I’ve been stuffing stats into a spreadsheet since the start of the year, and have been hacking away on a method of visualising it.

This post will be updated as our voyage continues:

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And “destination” posts will have a logistical section 🤓

A slight word on how this fits together, I know you geeks are out there.

Road and rail routes are mostly sourced using a script I wrote, which calls the Google directions API.

Maritime routes are mostly also obtained from the Google directions API, but less official crossings have been drawn by my fair hand with geojson.io.

Flight routes are actual, exported from flightradar24.com.

Laura would also like me to point out that asking her “what time did that bus we got (three weeks ago) arrive?” is not a very accurate way of measuring journey times. (Despite her having an excellent memory 💪).

All the data is mixed into the aforementioned spreadsheet, which looks something like this:

I then export it to JSON using this excellent Google Apps Script.

Yet another script is then run on this JSON. It’s based on simplify-js and uses the Douglas-Peucker algorithm to remove points in a curve that don’t pull their weight enough. For example, it reduces our flight from Barcelona to Singapore from being 1455 points to 279 points - and only causes a 930m loss in total distance.

The mashed JSON is fed into my blog as a resource. The blog itself uses the excellent Hugo static site generator. HTML tables are spat out based on the JSON, and I wrote some typescript glue that uses the magnificent maplibre to draw/animate it all on a map.

It’s a bit of manual effort to maintain at the moment, but we’re not transferring frequently enough for it to be too much of a burden. I’m sure I’ll end up making improvements to the method of collating it all as time goes on.

Data wise, all the the mashed JSON is 121kb. We’re 30% of the way through our trip (☹️), so I think that should be reasonable. If not I’ll have to scratch the noggin’ a bit.