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I am taking my usual Thanksgiving hiatus until Sunday or Monday. Enjoy your time with family, friends, and great food. We will get back to travel hacking next week. If you want to catch up on some of my favorite posts, see here.
The Economist’s sister magazine, Intelligent Life, published a fascinating map of travel time from London in 1914.
The map shows that most of Europe is reachable within five days, America in 6-20 days, and the remotest parts of South America, Africa, Australia, and Asia take more than 40 days to reach.
Let me remake the map for 2015. In blue I’ve highlighted places you can get within one day from London:
Yes, there are a few very remote places that would take more than 24 hours because you’d need to drive, boat, or hike after landing but you can basically be anywhere else in the world within a day because of airplanes, if you’ve got the cash. And of course all of us are here because we want to even eliminate the need to have money to travel.
I am profoundly thankful for the limitless possibilities that air travel and frequent flyer miles have opened up to me.
Next time I can’t find award space on my preferred day, or I am stuck in economy, or my flight is delayed, I’ll try to remember how lucky I am to live in the 2015 travel world instead of the 1914 travel world. Or as Louis CK put it:
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