2,100 Miles a Week

People used to call me crazy when they learned I drove 50 miles each way to work in Fairfield, three or four days a week, during my first two years at Sacramento State.

Even my 60-mile roundtrip to Auburn the last few years shocked many of my friends.

Both commutes pale in comparison to the daily grind I started this morning.

For the next year, I’m going to attempt to travel more than 400 miles daily, five days a week.

That’s more than 2,100 miles every week. Leaving our apartment before 6 a.m., getting home after 9 p.m.



There are exactly 341 kilometers of rail between Falköping and Stockholm, which is about 212 miles. To put my commute in perspective for a Californian, the following drives are each between 210 and 220 miles:

Eureka to Santa Rosa on US-101
Reno to San Francisco on I-80
Redding to San Francisco on I-5 and I-505
Sacramento to Visalia on CA-99
Fresno to Los Angeles on CA-99

Other trips in the same distance range include Boston to New York (215 miles), Phoenix to Yuma (211 miles) Ft. Lauderdale to Orlando (213 miles), Dallas to Oklahoma City (206 miles), Salem to Seattle (219) and Lansing to Chicago (218 miles).

It’s almost like commuting from New York City to Washington, D.C. (227 miles) or Toronto to Detroit (232 miles). And back. Every day.

The trip can be as short as 2 hours, 20 minutes each way depending on train type/speed and number of stops, but the average ride will be almost three hours each way. Most people wouldn’t wish that on their worst enemy.

Granted, there’s a huge difference between traveling 200 miles by train and making some of those aforementioned comparable drives in a car. They really shouldn’t be compared. This guy is the only one I could find who commutes a similar distance on roads. But six hours a day on a train is still borderline insane.

Fortunately, mobile broadband is booming in Sweden so I’ll have internet at all times. With a computer and web access, there are far fewer things I can’t do that I would do anywhere else.

My MacBook Pro and 3 stick are going to be my best friends.