13 March 2010

Travel by numbers

When people dream of travel writing, probably they don't dream of any of the administrative part. I typically spend the first two hours of any day exchanging email with photographers, publishers, editors, and PR people; going over pitches, draft itineraries, text for editing, and so on. Today I spent the entire day on 2009 accounts.

It was a quiet year in some ways: Scotland, Jamaica, Mexico, England, South Africa, Ontario, Philadelphia, and Alberta, making 11 weeks away altogether, 4.6 days in the air, and flights equivalent to 2.18 circumnavigations of the planet.

From the accountant's point of view this is an easy year: no Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese scripts to deal with, and perhaps the most astonishing thing is that I didn't go to China, although I was there very late in 2008, and I've already spent a month there this year. Trips to Japan, Spain, the US, Chile, Easter Island, and Brazil are already booked, and if I both take and survive them all I'll have beaten 2009's travel figures, to the detriment of the environment, by early August.

And if this posting is a little tedious, then there's a lesson to be learned from that. Most jobs have their bean counting aspects, even this one.
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