“Tis a big and beautiful world. Most of us live and die in the same corner where we were born and never get to see any of it. I don’t want to be most of us,” Oberyn Martell told us in Season Four of Game of Thrones, and while his travels may have sadly come to an end, three seasons later, the surviving characters of Thrones are anything but sedentary. In fact, some fans have complained that Game of Thrones’ characters have been a little too well-traveled in seasons of late– speeding from one side of the world to another with at a dizzying pace that can leave viewers with a sense of whiplash and confusion over the actual distances between locations. The UK’s Megabus.com, which generally specializes in providing bus tickets to those of us who cannot fly by dragon, sponsored a study to investigate the distances Game of Thrones characters have traveled and the results are pretty interesting.
Megabus details the methodology and results of its investigation in a blog post.
Their study revealed that characters traveled further and faster in the last two seasons than in the first 5 combined, as well as showing the top 10 most traveled characters throughout the show.
A few fun facts:
- Theon is the most travelled character clocking up 20,387 miles while Sansa only managed 6,024.
- 59,958 miles were covered in Seasons 1-5 while a massive 66,491 miles were travelled in the last two seasons alone
- More miles are travelled in seasons 6 and 7 than in the first five seasons combined.
- Many of the journeys would be much longer in reality. For example, Brienne travelling from Winterfell to Kings Landing would take just over 15 days of continuous travel* but occurs in half an episode
Megabus notes that the trend of “fast travel,” where long journeys are condensed into short periods of time, really came to a head in Season Seven. While Game of Thrones has never reached Lord of the Rings levels of drawn-out journey story-lines, it has been a little disconcerting to see characters seemingly traverse entire oceans in a few days time.
I wouldn’t have predicted Theon as the most traveled character in Game of Thrones, but that’s because he mainly got the majority of his mileage from his voyage to see Daenerys– a trip that was highlighted less than some of Daenerys’ or Tyrion’s travels and is easy to overlook. It will be interesting to see if his attempt to rescue his sister, Yara ,forces him to continue visiting foreign locales in the next season, as he tries to hunt down his uncle.
As you head home for Thanksgiving, it’s nice to remember that even in a fantastical world of dragons and wights, characters still have to pack their bags and suffer long travel times.
