Fancy seeing y’all here.
A month of GPS on one chart. The thin thread is the route; the stain is time — every place the phone lingered burns darker. Seven nights at Agay go nearly black, Paris and Rome pool deep, and the autoroutes barely tint the paper. Dashed lines are the flights, where the sky kept no record.
22,045 km. That is 55% of the way around the equator, or five and a half 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 0.6% 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: 849 km north to south, 1,226 km east to west. Every one of those extremes was set on a different leg of the trip.
Every distinct spot the phone stayed long enough to register 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, reconstructed from where the phone actually sat at 3:00 AM — not from the bookings — and the door that ends it.
28 June. The transatlantic, then a 320 km 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.
7,714 km 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. 507 GPS fixes inside a sovereign state of 2.1 km², ending on the 21:06 train that shaped the whole evening.
20 July, 07:23, on the autoroute south of Paris during the Chartres → CDG run. Independently corroborated by the Home Assistant track at 165.6 km/h.
United States, Italy, France, Monaco. Two of them share the euro; one of them you can walk across in an afternoon.