Analyzing Brian's driving habits

I've had four pretty distinct periods in my life, all based upon where I was living at the time: the Delaware years, the Texas years, the Juneau years, and, now, the Rez year. Each of these four places contributed in its own way to who I am today. I'll spare you the self-psychoanalysis; however, I am able to graphically present the last nine and a half years of my life as a function of my driving habits:

Delaware and Texas meld together in the graph (I moved in May 2001), but I was in the car for different reasons. My first job out of college had me driving to Jersey 53 miles each way, everyday, for close to a year. It wasn't so bad at the time. Howard Stern accompanied me northbound on 295 every morning. When I go back east to see family and subsequently visit friends across the river, I'm amazed I commuted that distance as long as I did. It's really far.

The next two years saw me living in the Metroplex. My intracity commute was a mere three miles one way, but my road trips took me... well... all over the Lower 48: California to Florida, Texas to North Dakota.

And then I moved to Juneau. Outside of one drive from Haines to Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Seward (2,168 miles, five days), my car was confined to the state capital's limited road system. I did rent a car during trips to southern California, Sacramento, and New Orleans; those trips would have barely registered on the graph though. Overall, I put about the same number of miles on my car in less than a year commuting to and from Jersey as I did in five and a half years in Juneau combined.

And now I live in South Dakota. I still like my road trips, but my tolerance for the all-day drive has dropped dramatically. My only long drives thus far have taken me to relatively nearby Denver, Lincoln, and Sioux City. But it was those now-familiar trips to Rapid and Sioux Falls (and Valentine!) that bumped my mileage up to around 20,000 in my first year back in the Lower 48.

A couple quick notes about the data... I didn't exactly re-create almost a decade's worth of driving just for a simple blog post (although I would have). Just for kicks, I started a spreadsheet toward the end of my time in Juneau using the mileage noted each time I had the oil changed or had some other service performed on my car.

The miles driven during specific trips, on the other hand, are kept in a notebook I update each time I return home from an extended drive. My around-the-country jaunt during Spring Break 2000 isn't reflected in the graph since my records only go back to the following 2000 (damn it!). But I can tell you I drove 6,721 miles in 10 days.