Travel by Numbers: 15 Months Abroad

We’ve told a lot of stories in the past 457 days. We’ve recapped our 15-month journey with photos, introduced you to elephants in Thailand with videos, and described each of the 135 thoughts we had hiking the Inca Trail with words. Our favorite stories we’ve told, though, have been with numbers. Our Travel by Numbers series is our quarterly infographic that quantitatively tells our story.

Gathering Data & Memories

I always planned to meticulously track our travel experiences. While Kenny was researching how much it would cost to spend three weeks in Medellin, I was building templates in Google Sheets with all the data points I wanted to collect throughout our travels.

I know that your output is only as a good as your input, so I put in everything. I documented and categorized every single thing we did, every single place we went, every single food we ate for fifteen months. It felt so essential to telling our story, and I was so committed to capturing every detail.

At the start, my reason for collecting the data was to drive a scorecard —this score card — but it quickly became so much more than that. Now, when I pick a random row in my workbook, it’s like I’m teleporting back in time. What started as a sterile, nerdy document, evolved into this beautiful memory book. It’s something I’ll cherish forever.

It’s also really helpful when someone is traveling somewhere we’ve been and asks what they should do. Win, win.

What Did the Data Say?

A lot! Our scorecard is below, but here are some of our favorite highlights.

• Coffee is Life. We visited 305 different cafes around the world, with an average of 3.2 coffee shops in every city.
• We Spent a Lot of Time on Planes. 206 hours, 30 minutes, and 13 seconds to be exact. That’s about 8.5 days.
• And Took Too Many Pictures. Each of our 32,908 photos is in an album organized by country, city and category.

• Fitness fell to the wayside. We logged more training miles in Q1 than we did in the next four quarters combined. That said, we did still manage to run three marathons abroad over 15 months.
• We Stayed Under Budget. Our original budget was $100 per-person per-day, including flights, accommodation, everything. At the end of 15 months, our average was $90.57 per-person, per-day.

• We’re polite. We learned to say thank you in 25 different languages.
• Walt would have been proud. We made our way to every single Disney park and it changed how we see the world.

• Love was in the air. We went to five weddings during our trip, including two in the US, two in Europe and one in Hong Kong. I was a bridesmaid in two and the Matron of Honor in one.
• Nothing bad really happened. We kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never did. We never got sick, never missed a flight and I only cried three times. (1: When we missed the train in Cusco. 2: When I messed up everything in Beijing. 3: When the hostel guy in Tel Aviv was a jerk.)

Travel by Numbers — 15 Months of Traveling the World

Here we go! This is what 15 months of traveling the world looks like.

And That’s a Wrap

This is our story. Our fifteen months traveling the world. This is our last Travel by Numbers for this specific trip, but there is a life’s worth of adventures ahead. This will not be our only brush with long-term travel and we look forward to documenting our future journeys with you.

Thanks for joining us for this ride, and we hope you continue to travel along with us.