This is the archive where finished trips get written up as records rather than stories: where the leg started, how far it actually ran, what it cost and what broke on the way. Everything here is transcribed from the notebook and the receipts kept during the trip itself, not reconstructed later from memory.
What goes into an entry
Every log entry uses the same six fields so two trips can be compared without rereading either of them. Distance is measured in miles as driven rather than as the crow flies, cost is recorded in the currency paid at the time, and the dates are the days the leg was actually travelled rather than the days it was planned for. Where a border or a ferry is involved, the waiting time is written down separately, because that number is the one that always surprises the next person reading it.
Photographs go in only where they show a road condition, a vehicle or a document. Scenery is left out on purpose, since a photograph of a good road tells you nothing about how long the road took.
The runs recorded so far
The longest single run in the archive is the sixteen month crossing from Paris down the length of the continent to Cape Town and back up to Nairobi, covering roughly thirty thousand miles across twenty-five countries. Shorter entries sit alongside it: two week rail loops, a winter of ferry hops through the Aegean, and a series of weekend drives that never left the country. Each one has its own page and its own cost table.
Runs that were abandoned halfway are kept too. A leg that ended early because of a closed border or a broken vehicle is more useful to read than one that went perfectly, because it shows where the plan had no slack in it.
How the mileage is counted
Mileage comes from the odometer at each overnight stop, entered the same evening while the number is still on the dashboard. Fuel is logged at every fill with the litres, the price and the grade, which makes the cost per hundred miles computable later without any estimating. Side trips are recorded as their own line rather than folded into the main leg, so the headline figure never quietly absorbs a detour.
What the logs are for
The point of keeping them is planning. A reader deciding whether a similar route fits into two weeks can take the daily average straight off these pages, add a margin for the border delays listed at the bottom of each entry, and get a number that holds up. The entries are updated when a road is resurfaced or a crossing changes season, and the date of the last check appears at the top of every log.