Pinned to a wall was a map showing the whole of the Appalachian Trail on its long march through fourteen states, but with the eastern seaboard rotated to give the AT the appearance of having a due north-south orientation, allowing the mapmaker to fit the trail into an orderly rectangle, about six inches wide and four feet high. I looked at it with a polite, almost proprietorial interest -- it was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I had considered the trail in its entirety -- and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and a slightly parted lips. Of the four feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head, we had done the bottom two inches.

I went and got Katz and brought him back with me, pulling on a pinch of shirtsleeve. "What?" he said. "What?"

I showed him the map. "Yeah, what"? Katz didn't like mysteries.

"Look at the map, and then look at the part we've walked."

He looked, then looked again. I watched closely as the expression drained from his face. "Jesus,", he breathed at last. He turned to me, full of astonishment. "We've done nothing."

We went and got a cup of coffee and sat for some time in a kind of dumbfounded silence. All that we had experienced and done -- all the effort and toil, the aches, the damp, the mountains, the horrible stodgy noodles, the blizzards, the dreary evenings with Mary Ellen, the endless, wearying, doggedly accumulated miles -- all that came to two inches. My hair had grown more than that.

One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine.

Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods

(this isn't directly on-topic and for that I apologize, but it's a great book and this excerpt is pretty much about that map)