Thursday 31 December 2009

A year and seven continents

We called 2009 “our gap year” and we were determined to make up for the fact that when we left University, we never had the opportunity to take the travelling gap year which is fairly common these days.

During 2009, we spent just over half the year outside England. Paul visited all seven continents and Pat visited six (missing out Africa which was a diving visit).

We flew at least 58,000 miles (all distances calculated as great circle distances - the shortest and therefore not the actual):

image

London Heathrow

Sao Paulo

5863 mi

Sao Paulo

Buenos Aries

1070 mi

Buenos Aries

Ushuaia

1460 mi

Ushuaia

Rio Gallegos

228 mi

Rio Gallegos

Buenos Aries

1277 mi

Buenos Aries

Sao Paulo

1070 mi

Sao Paulo

London Heathrow

5863 mi

 

 

 

London Gatwick

Sharm el Sheikh

2404 mi

Sharm el Sheikh

London Gatwick

2404 mi

 

 

 

London Stansted

Granada

1034 mi

Granada

London Stansted

1034 mi

 

 

 

London Gatwick

Marsa Alam

2543 mi

Marsa Alam

London Gatwick

2543 mi

 

 

 

London Heathrow

Singapore

6765 mi

Singapore

Darwin

2074 mi

Darwin

Cairns

1042 mi

Alice Springs

Darwin

808 mi

Darwin

Singapore

2074 mi

Singapore

London Heathrow

6765 mi

 

 

 

London Heathrow

Reykjavik

1180 mi

Reykjavik

London Heathrow

1180 mi

 

 

 

London Heathrow

Washington Dulles

3677 mi

Newark New York

London Heathrow

3465 mi

 

 

 

Total:

 

57822 mi

We also drove over 12,000 miles (mainly in Australia) and sailed about 4000 miles (Antarctica and the Red Sea) and we would be the first to admit that as a result, our carbon footprint was high.

We had an absolutely wonderful time; made lots of new friends, saw places and had experiences which we will always remember. When we muse over some of the things we did, we cannot really believe some of them and nor can our family and friends.

We originally started the blog just to enable friends and family to keep track of where we were and what we were doing. However, the number of hits on the blog exceeded 12,000 by the end of the year and when we added an automatic map to the blog showing where readers lived, we were astonished to see the wide geographical spread of readers and followers.

It was a wonderful year and we are very grateful for having had the good fortune and opportunity to take a year out.

We have some draft plans for travelling in 2010 – you can be sure that they will feature in this blog as and when they happen.

Pat and Paul Harvey
December 31st 2009