elyob
March 2006. My first GPS-tagged phone photo landed in a desktop archive that nobody called "surveillance" yet. Twenty years on, that archive is 42,094 timestamped breadcrumbs across four continents and 29 countries with a confirmed overnight. Tracking was patchy until around 2012, so the overnight counts below really cover the last 15 years rather than the full twenty.
Where I slept is decided by the GPS fix closest to 04:00 in the local timezone of wherever that point sat — a border crossing at midnight lands on the correct side, and a red-eye over the Gulf counts as a night in the Gulf, not in London. Flights are in: if I wasn't asleep I was at least in my seat, and that was my bed for the night.
In the reliable window I slept roughly 4,210 nights in my own bed — about 11.5 of the 15 years. The remaining 476 were somewhere else: 289 abroad, 172 elsewhere in the UK, and 15 in transit — ferry cabins, overnight trains and red-eyes where the 04:00 fix was moving. The top overseas destinations: France (50), Malaysia (43), India (41), Thailand (22), Indonesia (21).
2016 was the peak overseas year — 91 nights away across 11 countries. 2019 was the widest — 12 distinct countries with an overnight in a single calendar year: Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Czechia, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Switzerland.
Roughly 10.7× the equator, or 1.12× the distance to the Moon. Twenty years of moving around adds up.
Motorcycle Route Maps
One feature-image map per motorcycle post, oldest to newest. Tap any map to open the full trip writeup.
Fastest Speed Per Year
The GPS also knows how fast I was moving between overnights. Taking the peak segment each year gives a rough "top speed recorded" — flights dominate travelling years, road speeds take over in quiet ones, and years the tracker barely ran only caught me walking.
| Year | mph | km/h | Guess | Where |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | 27 | 43 | road | (over water) |
| 2007 | 38 | 61 | road | South Africa |
| 2008 | 393 | 633 | flight | United Kingdom |
| 2009 | — | — | — | — |
| 2010 | 3 | 5 | walking | United Kingdom |
| 2011 | 5 | 8 | walking | United Kingdom |
| 2012 | 269 | 433 | flight | United Kingdom |
| 2013 | 739 | 1,190 | flight | United Kingdom |
| 2014 | 731 | 1,177 | flight | Ireland |
| 2015 | 596 | 959 | flight | United Kingdom |
| 2016 | 735 | 1,183 | flight | United Kingdom |
| 2017 | 597 | 960 | flight | (over water) |
| 2018 | 741 | 1,193 | flight | United Kingdom |
| 2019 | 397 | 639 | flight | Romania |
| 2020 | 419 | 675 | flight | United Kingdom |
| 2021 | 90 | 145 | road | United Kingdom |
| 2022 | 616 | 991 | flight | United Kingdom |
| 2023 | 450 | 725 | flight | United Kingdom |
| 2024 | 501 | 807 | flight | United Kingdom |
| 2025 | 42 | 67 | road | United Kingdom |
| 2026 | 711 | 1,144 | flight | (over water) |
GPS sampled about once a minute, so peak speeds are missed. Flight figures are ground speed (jet-stream assisted). Anything above 746 mph (1,200 km/h) was binned as a bad fix. Mode is guessed from the speed band: above 186 mph (300 km/h) is a flight; in years the tracker barely ran, only walking was captured. Map dots show each year's peak — walking, road, flight.
Year by Year
Every overnight clustered into unique stops — amber for a single night, red for multi-night stays. Barbados sits alone mid-Atlantic; SE Asia is a near-continuous chain from the 2016 / 2017 trips; Europe is a blur of motorcycle routes.
| Year | Nights | Home | UK other | Abroad | Transit | Countries visited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 246 | 203 | 28 | 13 | 2 | Barbados, Italy |
| 2013 | 310 | 290 | 15 | 3 | 2 | France |
| 2014 | 363 | 333 | 7 | 23 | 0 | |
| 2015 | 345 | 285 | 29 | 29 | 2 | |
| 2016 | 356 | 251 | 14 | 85 | 6 | |
| 2017 | 357 | 284 | 17 | 53 | 3 | |
| 2018 | 361 | 321 | 28 | 12 | 0 | France |
| 2019 | 364 | 323 | 11 | 30 | 0 | |
| 2020 | 364 | 362 | 2 | 0 | 0 | — |
| 2021 | 365 | 357 | 8 | 0 | 0 | — |
| 2022 | 362 | 359 | 3 | 0 | 0 | — |
| 2023 | 343 | 338 | 5 | 0 | 0 | — |
| 2024 | 307 | 307 | 0 | 0 | 0 | — |
| 2025 | 105 | 103 | 2 | 0 | 0 | — |
| 2026 | 138 | 94 | 3 | 41 | 0 | India |
Visits to Parents's house
Visits to Parents's house, split by whether I slept over (overnight = 04:00-local fix within 300 m) or just dropped in (day-visit = present during the day but slept elsewhere). Zero-visit years omitted.
| Year | Overnights | Day visits |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 2 | 5 |
| 2013 | 1 | 16 |
| 2014 | 3 | 19 |
| 2015 | 4 | 21 |
| 2016 | 2 | 18 |
| 2017 | 4 | 18 |
| 2018 | 8 | 27 |
| 2019 | 5 | 24 |
| 2020 | 0 | 24 |
| 2021 | 1 | 25 |
| 2022 | 3 | 30 |
| 2023 | 1 | 21 |
| 2024 | 0 | 41 |
| 2025 | 2 | 8 |
| 2026 | 3 | 12 |
| Total | 39 | 309 |
What Fed the Data
Twenty years of survival through hardware changes. The Dawarich database stamps each point with the tracker that fed it — which is how the eras below are datable, not just guessed.
google-maps-timeline-export — a Google Takeout dump, re-imported into Dawarich. Twelve years on a single always-on background service, through whatever iPhone was current at the time. This is where the data stops being patchy and starts being a diary.
dw.elyob.com — no Google involved. First era where altitude is recorded at source (which is why every point before November 2024 had to be back-filled from the Copernicus DEM for the Highest Places table above).A few caveats. Pre-2006 is gone — no GPS at all. The strict-overnight audit yields 26 countries with a confirmed sleep; another handful are memory-backed day-trips (Andorra is the only country that counts without an overnight, per my own rule).
Twenty years is a long time for a dataset to survive a change of phone, three generations of tracker, one pandemic, and two self-hosted-database migrations. The next twenty years won't have to rely on memory.