If you weren’t travelling vicariously with us on the twelve-month grand tour of the globe that we completed, you may be wondering why we’ve been complaining in recent posts of being so tired. Well, we were busy. Very busy. Don’t believe us? Below are some statistics from our yearlong trip. This is a Grand Tour by numbers.
In hindsight, we would have preferred to do the trip as we originally intended, staying one month in each destination — and not moving accommodation within that month — but the opportunity to partner up with HomeAway was too good to pass up.
The shorter time frame was just enough time to get an insight into living like locals in the destinations we visited, as much as we would have loved to have travelled even slower.
We met our goals to learn a little of the local language of each place, to learn to cook some local dishes, and to connect with locals as much as we could in the short time available.
We met some extraordinary people, a few of whom we have caught up with elsewhere around the world as our paths crossed during the year.
There was a couple of long-haul flights that we could have done without, but Round the World Flights saved our skin on a couple of occasions where the tour could have gone off the rails.
There were times when we could not get our Wi-Fi to work properly and wasted precious time we could have spent exploring sitting at our laptops posting stories. We lost count of how many SIM cards we used in a year!
We should also have tallied up how many dishwasher, microwave and oven user manuals Terence had to look up online as well!
A Grand Tour By Numbers — 365 Days, 34 Places and 723 Meals Cooked
365 days on the road
34 destinations experienced
88.417 km / 54,940 miles travelled — or around a quarter of the way to the moon! See Tripline.
30 planes, 26 trains, 8 buses, 13 cars, and 2 boats caught
36 holiday rentals that we made our homes
723 meals cooked in holiday rentals
40 recipes created for The Dish & Weekend Eggs
44 tours taken
499 blog posts uploaded
424,150 words written
57,000 photos taken
Countless memories created
You guys worked so hard – I used all of your Morocco tips before my trip to Marrakesh. A great project! Congrats!
Wow, insanity! Congrats you guys. A virtual post to just as many more happy travels!
Wow, some massive numbers – it’s really be an awesome journey and glad we could follow along!
Love the post! 57.000 pictures taken, wow!
Happy future travels, I am so looking forward to see more beautiful photography from you!
Wow! Those are some numbers!
What a wonderful journey and how nice to follow you all the way! You guys have been terrific, we go back and forth throughout your posts and find so much inspiration! You are our guide on our future trips! When is a book due..?
Those are indeed some intense stats!! We are most jealous of the 25 wine and liquor tastings…in fact if it would have been our trip, I think we would have eased of on the charitable deeds, and put a bit more focus on the merlot samplings…. :)
Nice work guys!
Yeah, what were we thinking…?
Thanks!
Thanks, guys! Much appreciated.
We did, but if it means people like you have a great time with the fruits of our labour (this website), then it was all worth it! Thanks!
Thanks, Kristina! Crazy numbers, I know – which is why we thought we should share them. Terence will do his best for you in the photography department. Images from Thailand, Laos and Vietnam will go up with posts soon to accompany stories on our recent travels.
Insane, hey?
And you know we were going to do more… we were hoping to write about the quintessentially local liquid in each place we stayed but sometimes we just couldn’t find the right experts or the right tour/experience in time…
If we would have had an assistant helping to coordinate each two week stay we could have done more of everything. I actually would have loved to have covered more charitable deeds, but it always took ages to find things to do and often we’d identify them on the last couple of days. Shame.
Has anyone done a “365 days of tastings” tour of the world? Maybe that’s *your* trip?! :)
working so hard eh… 499 blog posts and 57000 pictures… that’s overwhelming… take a little break :-)
Not only are the stats impressive but the fact that you actually keep track makes it more wonderful and amazing. Best wishes on future travels.
Wow, that’s brilliant – 57,000 photos and so many words. Great stuff :)
Thanks, Antonio. Sorry for missing this message before. Thanks for the kind words. Not sure when the Grantourismo book will be finished, we have a guidebook to Bangkok first, and still debating whether to go with a traditional publisher and do the Grantourismo book in print or release it as an iPad book. We’ll see…