European Drift 2026, by the Numbers

I have now treated my Google Timeline as a GPS track rather than a mere collection of visits—and suddenly the European Drift has revealed its proper scale. Between 6 May and 4 June 2026, Vanilla and I traced approximately 4,006 miles, or 6,447 kilometres, across Europe. Not Google’s rather wobbly activity totals, but the journey reconstructed point by point from the actual trail my phone recorded.

The headline is wonderfully satisfying: approximately 4,006 GPS-traced miles. I calculated it from consecutive Timeline points, while excluding obvious gaps and impossible jumps. It is a strong approximation rather than an odometer reading, but it gives a vastly more realistic picture than Google’s broken distanceMeters total.

Some individual activity records report tiny distances despite enormous changes in geography. On 31 May, for example, the Timeline clearly carries me from the Wolfsburg area towards western Germany while the activity field records only a fraction of the real movement. The breadcrumbs know where I went; the summary occasionally seems to have stopped for a coffee.

The GPS trail shows 23 substantial travelling days with at least about 25 miles of movement. Launch day was the giant: 6 May clocked roughly 362 GPS miles as I left Staffordshire and pointed Vanilla towards continental Europe.

The other monster days were 10 May at about 252 miles, 30 May at 242, 31 May at 235, 11 May at 233, 7 May at 221, 26 May at 210 and 14 May at 205. The final charge home included about 193 miles on 2 June and 176 on 3 June. These were relocation days with purpose—but they were not the whole holiday.

That distinction matters. This was not 30 days of grinding down motorways. There were roughly 22 serious road days, surrounded by days that belonged to staying put, wandering, photographing, eating and remembering why I had driven all that way in the first place.

After merging overlapping Google visit and activity intervals, the broad pattern comes out at roughly 546 hours stopped or visiting and 181 hours classed as movement: approximately 75% stopped and 25% travelling.

The fine-grained GPS track contains around 148 hours of closely sampled movement data. I am not pretending every minute of the month was continuously sampled, but the broader Timeline structure is clear. Three quarters of the adventure was spent being somewhere. That may be my favourite statistic of the lot.

The northernmost point was approximately 52.789°N, essentially back around Staffordshire. The westernmost was roughly 52.7643°N, 2.1079°W, also near home on the return. The southernmost point was 42.6390°N, 18.1088°E, in the Dubrovnik area; the easternmost was 42.6418°N, 18.1149°E, again around Dubrovnik.

So Dubrovnik takes three titles at once: southernmost, easternmost and furthest from home. The straight-line distance from home to the furthest GPS point was approximately 1,164 miles, or 1,873 kilometres. That is crow-flies distance. Vanilla, being neither a crow nor especially aerodynamic, naturally took the scenic route.

Croatia was the country champion. I spent around ten days moving down and back up its coast, making it comfortably the longest foreign section. The data places me around Split on 20–21 May at approximately 43.504°N, 16.526°E before I pushed all the way down towards Dubrovnik and eventually turned north again.

At the opposite extreme was Bosnia and Herzegovina. Crossing the Neum corridor during the Croatian coastal journey made it the briefest country appearance—but it absolutely counts. Boots, wheels and GPS were physically inside the country. Border bingo accepted.

The reconstructed overnight rhythm ran approximately through France, Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and Germany, Czechia, Germany again, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and finally home. There were two Swiss nights, five Italian nights and around nine Croatian nights in the sequence.

That pattern proves the middle of the journey belonged to Italy and Croatia. It was never a frantic exercise in collecting flags. I covered a huge area, but I also stopped long enough for places to become chapters rather than motorway signs.

Four thousand and six miles is roughly the distance from Stafford to New York, give or take a few hundred miles—except I did it across roads, ferries and the gloriously complicated geography of Europe. It is about 16% of the Earth’s circumference and averages 134 miles per day across the full 30 days.

I entered 12 countries, averaging one every two and a half days, yet still spent about three quarters of the trip stationary. By 31 May the GPS trail was sweeping west across Germany; by 2–3 June I was around Bruges at 51.1953, 3.2260 before Vanilla finally turned towards Britain.

The final scoreboard reads: 30 days, 12 countries, approximately 4,006 miles or 6,447 kilometres, 23 substantial travelling days, a longest day of about 362 miles, a furthest point 1,164 miles from home, Croatia as the longest foreign stay, Bosnia as the shortest visit and Dubrovnik holding the southernmost, easternmost and furthest-point trophies.

That is a genuinely substantial European road trip—and the best bit is that these figures were not rescued from hazy memories or social-media albums. They came from the actual breadcrumbs my phone left behind, all the way across Europe.