canyonwalker | 2022 Travel Wrap-up: Oh, The Places I Went! (Reply)

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog. My travel is complete for the year— I returned from Five Days in the Desert Wednesday night even though I still have a few more blogs to push out from the trip— so I can tally up my 2022 travel statistics even though there's still just over half a day to go in 2022.

Here are Five Things:

Coronavirus remained part of the story in 2022. You would think that 2-3 years on from the emergence of Coronavirus, and 12-24 months past the availability of vaccines, we'd be past it by now. You'd think. But the Omicron surge in late 2021 led us to cancel a planned New Year's Eve trip a year ago and stay home for the first few months of 2022. Coronavirus remained a concern throughout the year. We took precautions on every trip— including wearing masks in all airports and aboard aircraft and other mass transit— and tested ourselves whenever we experienced symptoms that might be Covid.

I flew 32,000 miles in 2022. I track this via flightmemory.com, where you can input your flights and it computes the distance via Great Circle routes. Technically the actual distance I flew with my butt in a seat is greater, as flight plans deviate from Great Circle routes to take advantage of winds and avoid bad weather, but this is the statistic I go with because it's easy to compute. After a few years of very little flying (11k miles in 2020, all in Jan-Feb, and 21k in 2021) this is a partial return to my recent average of 50k/year. Of course it's nothing like the 150k+/year I flew back in the late 00s/early 10s when I was a globe-trotting business traveler.

Speaking of business travel, it's only starting to come back. Trade shows resumed running in-person this year, but meeting clients in person isn't yet a thing again. Partly that's because lots of people in IT haven't returned to offices after Coronavirus. And even where people are back in offices now, company policies and cultures largely haven't reopened to permitting visitors onsite.

I traveled 79 days and 72 nights in 2022. As with flight miles this is up from the past two years though not quite back to my pre-Coronavirus average of around 100/year. The difference is that while business travel remains slower than before Coronavirus I've partly made up for it in my schedule by traveling more frequently for leisure. Almost 80% of my travel in 2022 was leisure. Yay, lots of long weekend trips!

Bucket List items checked off: 0. It was a poor year for crossing travel things off my bucket list. I visited no new US states (I'm still at 49/51), no new foreign countries, and no new US national parks (still at 51/63). I already have trips booked to make progress on 2 of these in 2023. Planning for the third is in the works.