There's no place like home

We slept in our own bed last night, for the first time in 13 months of travel around the world since we left our home in San Francisco in June 2007 .

Since we got back to the USA in June 2008 we’ve driven almost 10,000 miles across North America and back, through 30 states of the USA and 4 Canadian provinces. Added to the 70,000 miles we’d travelled by the time we passed through San Francisco (the air mileage on this map is a bit less than the distance we actually covered on the ground, especially in Australia where we rented a car for almost 10,000 km), that makes for a total of 28 countries and 80,000 miles together in our entire trip. (I came back to Washington, DC, by myself from Buenos Aires for 3 days in the middle of our trip, although I didn’t make it home to San Francisco. Adding that in, I travelled a total of 90,000 miles or 150,000 km from leaving home until returning.)

We changed our originally planned route somewhat and ended up visiting parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, the Vatican, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Qatar, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Yemen, Egypt, Eritrea, China (Hong Kong SAR), Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Japan, the USA, and Canada.

Just as themes had emerged in the overseas portion of our journey (the legacy of the Ottoman empire and the Crusades in many places we visited; rising prices of food and to a lesser extent energy; the growing role of China and the European Union in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; the decline of the US dollar; the decline of US hegemony or “leadership” in every aspect except military and cultural; the shift from geographically separated First and Thirds Worlds, or global North and South, to a world in which Northern and Southern wealth and ways of living coexist, albeit unstably, within the same countries), so there were themes to our North American road trip (friends and relatives our age facing issues of parenting teenagers, caring for increasingly infirm parents, and going through midlife crises and in some cases divorces).

It’s good to be home, but there’s a lot for me to do both in my writing (look for major updates to this Web site) and in my work for the Identity Project .

[Follow-up: Some places I recommend from my trip.]