Roads Traveled in Town

Looking at some personal maps by people in respective communities, I was reminded of other maps drawn by folks growing up in various communities in another work that I read. That work pointed out the disparity of experience between peoples of various classes, how some folks stay very close to the home neighborhood, and as a result, the mental maps of their city outside of the immediate confines is very vague.

I tend to think of myself as knowing my city fairly well, having been around it now for over a decade and travelling around it quite a bit, especially when I was single and more prone to going out (that said, married life with kids has taken me other places in the city to which I would not have ventured as a single person, so my experiences, while probably less diverse within the last few years, have grown wider in the total sum of my time in town than they would have had my life continued as it had).

I decided not so much to draw a mental map as to draw a map of the streets I actually traveled in a given week. The thicker the line, the more often I traveled it (by walking, car, or bus). What's interesting to me about this map is how thick the lines are toward home (even compared with work). We live at a dead end, so unless the destination is home, there's little reason to come or go from there. If I'm out, I'm likely to run several errands at once rather than returning home. Still, one can be guaranteed to travel the seldom-traveled dead end road at least twice each time one comes and goes out--in other words, almost always at least twice a day. Hence, while work may be more centrally located, it is not someplace I travel on weekends, and the variety of roads that can take me there also means I travel different routes depending on the bus I take or whether I drive or walk.

Certainly, were I to have drawn this map five years ago, in the waning days of singledom, it would have looked different, or six years ago when I worked in a different location. Living in a more central area of the city at that time, the lines would have been thick near home as well--and I would have expected that, because of its very centrality. But what this map shows is that home (even more than a given city center) is generally always central. For my family and for me personally, our little dead end is a heavy-traffic road.

Trips to Boston

I visited Boston in October on a research and work trip. It was my fourth time to the area and the first in a decade. Here are the times I've visited Boston in the past:

I love Boston. I almost moved there at one point. But I don't know that I'd actually like living there. I've always visited in the fall--never had to endure the weather. And it's superexpensive.

Church Retreats

Each year I attend a convention held by my church. I've done so since I was a baby. I only remember the locations from age five on. I've gone to sites outside the United States six times (to Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, and Spain). Here are the states I've been to and how many times:

Interstates I've Driven and Ridden On 2

It's been a couple of years since I last updated this, so I thought it might be good to feature this map again. Trips (by bus and car) to Indiana and (by car) to Raleigh, North Carolina, and within parts of Colorado mean I've seen a few other roads.

And if you find the map above interesting, someone else has a whole set of U.S. maps about linguistic differences from place to place around the country that you can find here. I often don't seem to fall into either the California or the Deep South camp; I have no idea why my pronunciations are so generally strange (for example, I say q-pon, not koo-pon for coupon, which apparently is odd just about everywhere).

Trains, Planes, Automobiles, and Buses

I recently went to Indiana via bus, the first time I've taken an interstate bus since age five, which caused me to ponder how I generally have traveled long distances. Below is the summary of how I've traveled each year, when taking trips (that I remember, sometimes estimated) over three hundred miles and trips over five hundred miles. Train and bus have not been too popular; car and plane have been used the most for between three hundred and five hundred miles, though most of that plane travel was in the early 1990s, when I had a job that involved a once-a-month trip from Southern California to Northern; on my own, I'd usually drive that distance.

Three Hundred Miles

Five Hundred Miles

Approximate Distance Traveled for Last Five Dates

I'll go a long way for a date, especially since women of my faith are so few and far between.

Car Colors

I've only owned three vehicles, each of them in a different color. Here are the vehicle colors that have thus dominated my life:

I didn't realize I'd owned the car I have now for so long (seven years). Hard to believe how much time has passed since I purchased it.

Miles Driven per Year

The miles I've driven each year have gotten higher over the course of the past six years, when I bought my current car. There's a notable jump in 2008, and that's when the only car rental company in town stopped allowing people to rent cars and drive out of state. Before, I'd always done long trips in a rental car; now I have to put the miles on my own car. My own car is nice, so the rental cars were often, in terms of comfort, a step down. Still, I don't like that an extra two to four thousand miles now goes on my vehicle per year.

Another big jump happened at the beginning of 2011, when my church split, as I now have to drive an extra thirty miles per week (fifty instead of twenty). In fact, because I bus to work and walk home three days a week, most of my mileage in a given year is for church--and those aforesaid long trips (this year, one to Texas and one to Florida).

Interstates I've Driven and Ridden

I have lived most of my adult life in the South. Hence, most of my Interstate driving has been in the South, as this map shows, the West Coast driving being mostly my moves back and forth and back from California. The yellow are the Interstates, the purple those I've driven.

However, if we include driving from when I was a kid, and my parents took me with them on various trips, my West Coast Interstate experience increases exponentially. Most of the Interstates I knew, in fact, back then were western. The few Northeast Interstates I've ridden on are from trips I've taken as an adult, which generally involve flying to an area to visit with others who then drove me to other places. The yellow are the Interstates, the purple are those I've driven, the red those I've ridden.

My U.S. Map by Decade

I wanted to see how much where I live affects how much time I spend in various states. It's interesting how the trajectory changes as I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast. The 1990s, where I lived in three different states and did significant in-state travel represent the time when I was present for a time in the most states. The 2000s, where I've spent most of the decade in Georgia fill in a few of the eastern and midwestern states, but the West Coast now has started to look anemic, as the East Coast did when I was younger. One difference: I have family on the West Coast, so there's still an excuse to go back.

In the maps below, the black states are those I lived in during the decade. The dark gray states are those I spent at least one contiguous week in, and the light states are those I at least "touched."

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

So far the 2010s are shaping up to look similar to the 2000s.

States I've Been To

I've been to most of the U.S. states. I'm missing, however, a huge chunk right at the top of the country, and another swath in the nation's mid-Atlantic region, as is evidenced in this map of the states to which I've been. The darker highlights represent those states in which I've spent at least twenty-four consecutive hours. The number of states in which I've done this actually surprised me, as I thought there were more states of the type like Oklahoma, where I spent probably just an hour--one Sunday, when I was living in Texas, I drove up and across the border to eat at Carl's Jr., just to be able to say I'd been to the old Indian Territory.



But twenty-four consecutive hours may not even be the best way to describe legitimately large amounts of time--after all, some states I may not have spent a consecutive twenty-four hours in, but I've so often been through them that I probably have spent more than twenty-four hours in total. Another way to think of time spent might be to color those dark the states that I've spent a night in:



To what extent are the states that I've visited a reflection of the places where I've lived? I thought that might present an interesting map in itself, and it does. Notice that I've spent the majority of my life in the band of sunbelt states, and my travels mimic that to a degree. Those states farthest from where I lived are often those I haven't journey to.



If I were to color this map as it would have appeared when I was twenty, before I took a trip by train across the nation, the highlighted states would be almost entirely in the west, like this:



Even after that trip, the other states wouldn't fill in for years, because I was still until age twenty-four a California only resident:



One day, perhaps, I'll get to the other twelve states I'm missing. I hope I don't have to move to North Dakota to do it though.

Al Is back in Town

My friend Al is moving back to town this weekend. This means that I'll be seeing him on regular occasions again. He's been gone about four years, off at two different graduate schools in two different states. Somehow, we've managed to keep in touch. It helps that his love of Athens has never subsided and his parents live nearby. Hence, he's been back with some regularity.

Al is a mysterious guy to me--he never seems short of friends or of new acquaintances. I, on the other hand, feel perennially short of them; I find making new friends or feeling comfortable around new people--or even many "old" people--difficult. But Al puts a person at ease.

That I still know Al, after having met him over fifteen years ago, seems in some ways amazing. We went to graduate school together. We were in a writing group together, and on a few occasions did social things together. But I wouldn't have thought of him at the time as my closest pal at grad school. After he moved on, we exchanged letters and more rarely phone calls (this, before the days when e-mail was common, so we're talking real letters). In other words, we stayed in touch. I only stayed in touch with three other grad students, one of whom has since dropped out of my life and two of whom (i.e., a couple) have kept up a very irregular though wonderful acquaintance. With Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like, a lot of other friends from those days have since gotten back in touch, which is great too.

But Al has become something more than a grad school buddy. He's become one of my closest friends.

Recently, Al completed a novel. I haven't read it--not that I don't want to (but I haven't been given a copy). Others have, though, and I've been told I am in it, neuroses and all. One of those neuroses is what inspired me to start doing this blog--my desire to document things in a statistical format. And so, it seems fitting, since Al is moving back to town, to document what interactions I've managed to have with Al since he left. That information, however, would have been very difficult to put together, so I've settled for this much more narrow graphic--the interaction I've had with Al in the past year. So here it is, a map of places I've hung out with Al since last May.