Trips you never took
CouchColumbus is a web toy that builds a travel timeline from where you are right now to a city you would like to see, stringing together the cities you might plausibly have stopped at along the way.
Why we made it
Google Maps Timeline replays the roads you actually travelled as an animation on a map. Meeting a year of distance as a number is oddly moving. The catch is that to feel it, you have to have gone somewhere first.
CouchColumbus reverses that order. You do not have to go. Pick one destination from your bed and you get an itinerary complete with stopovers, dates and a total distance, and an aeroplane crossing the map. Vicarious satisfaction is the point, and that is all of it.
How it works
- It takes the nearest city to the location your browser reports and uses it as the origin. You can change it yourself.
- It picks stopovers at random from the cities that lie along the way between origin and destination.
- It interpolates each leg along a great circle — the shortest path across the surface of the Earth — to draw an airline-style curve.
- The dates are aligned to end with an arrival today, so it looks like a trip you have just come back from.
To be clear
The itineraries, dates and distances made here are entirely invented. They are not a record of real travel, and they have nothing to do with real flights or bookings. This is made for fun and shared for fun; it is not built for deceiving anyone.
Where your data ends up
There are no accounts and no servers. The itineraries you make are stored only inside your browser, and your location is used to pick a departure city and then discarded. The details are written up in the Privacy Policy.