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HistorySpeculative

Paul Revere's Midnight Ride: Boston to Concord

On the night of 18 April 1775 Paul Revere was rowed across the Charles River, got a horse in Charlestown and rode west to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that British troops were on the move. He left three accounts of that night, and this route follows them rather than the poem. It runs through nine places, from his house in North Square and the lanterns at Old North Church to the pasture in Lincoln where a British patrol stopped him, and on to Concord, which Samuel Prescott reached without him. Where a spot is only traditional, the stop says so.

9 locations7/9 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

The Innocents Abroad: Twain's Quaker City Cruise

In June 1867 the steamship Quaker City left New York on what Mark Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion", a chartered trip to Europe and the Holy Land. A newspaper, the Alta California, paid for his place in exchange for fifty articles, and those letters grew into The Innocents Abroad. This route follows eight stops: the Wall Street pier, the Azores, Tangier, Milan, Athens, a palace garden near Yalta, Jerusalem and the Sphinx. Each is told through Twain's own scenes, from donkey rides and hotel bills to the places that stopped his jokes. Where he does not name a spot, the pin marks the nearest known place.

8 locations7/8 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Apollo 11: From Pad 39A to the Pacific

On 16 July 1969 a Saturn V lifted the Apollo 11 crew off a Florida launch pad; eight days later their capsule dropped into the Pacific. In between, the first people walked on another world while an estimated 600 million watched on Earth. The route follows the mission through six stops: the launch pad in Florida, Mission Control in Houston, Tranquility Base on the Moon, the Australian dish that carried the moonwalk pictures, the splashdown and the capsule's museum home. The Moon stop has no pin because the map shows Earth only; its lunar coordinates are given in the text.

6 locations3/6 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Wild: Mojave to the Bridge of the Gods

In June 1995 Cheryl Strayed, 26 and with no hiking experience, set out alone to walk 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Her memoir Wild reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and Reese Witherspoon played her in the 2014 film. This route follows the hike north from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River, using the memoir's outline and the film's best-known scenes. The film compresses and dramatises, so stops drawn from it say so, and pins mark areas rather than campsites.

7 locations6/7 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Travels with Charley: Around America in 1960

In 1960 the novelist John Steinbeck fitted a pickup truck with a camper shell, named it Rocinante and set out from Long Island with his poodle, Charley. He wanted to see his country because he made his living writing about it, and his main question was what Americans are like today. This route follows eight stops of the outer loop, from Sag Harbor through Maine, Niagara Falls and Minnesota to Montana, Yellowstone and Steinbeck's native Salinas Valley, then down to New Orleans. The book is a novelist's account: it has been challenged as partly fictionalised, so read the encounters as stories and the places as real.

8 locations6/8 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Lewis and Clark: Up the Missouri to the Pacific

In May 1804 William Clark and about 30 others left a winter camp on the Mississippi and turned up the Missouri, the first stage of an expedition sent to cross the newly acquired western part of the country. Captains Meriwether Lewis and Clark kept journals, and many of their entries are quoted here in their own spelling. The route follows them from Camp Dubois past a sergeant's grave, a tense standoff with the Teton Sioux, a winter at Fort Mandan, the Great Falls, the Continental Divide and the snowbound Lolo Trail to the Pacific, then home by way of Clark's signature on Pompeys Pillar. Where a camp is lost to the river or to time, the pin marks the nearest place you can visit.

11 locations10/11 visitable

BooksExact

A Moveable Feast: Hemingway's Paris Years

Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast about his poor, happy early years in 1920s Paris, working from notebooks he had left in trunks at the Ritz in 1928. It was published in 1964, after his death. This route walks the memoir's Paris: the flat on the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, Gertrude Stein's salon, Sylvia Beach's bookshop, the cafés of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain, and the Ritz where the notebooks resurfaced. Hemingway himself said the book may be read as imagination, so treat its scenes as a memory, not a record.

8 locations5/8 visitable

BooksFictional

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Down the Mississippi

Huck Finn fakes his own murder and, with Jim, who has run away from slavery, takes a raft down the Mississippi. Their goal is Cairo, where Jim would be a free man the minute he saw it. They miss it in the fog and drift on into slave country, past a feud, two con men and a farm with the book's last twist. Twain built St. Petersburg from his boyhood town of Hannibal. Most places in the novel are invented, so each pin marks a real landmark or stand-in, and the Grangerfords' country and Bricksville stay off the map.

7 locations4/7 visitable

BooksFictional

Moby-Dick: From New Bedford to the Pequod

Before the white whale there is a cold December and a wrong turn at the docks. Ishmael arrives in New Bedford to find the Nantucket packet gone, rents half a bed at the Spouter-Inn, sits through a sermon on Jonah, crosses to Nantucket and signs aboard the Pequod, which leaves on Christmas Day. New Bedford had overtaken Nantucket as the country's top whaling port by 1840, yet Ishmael is set on sailing from the island. The route follows his first chapters. The inn, the Try Pots and the Pequod are invented, so their pins mark real places that stand in for them; the chapel is real.

6 locations6/6 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Thelma & Louise: The Road to the Grand Canyon

Two friends set out for a weekend at a fishing cabin, and one violent night at a roadhouse bar turns the trip into a run for Mexico across the American West. Ridley Scott's 1991 film is set on a route from Arkansas to the Grand Canyon, but it was filmed almost entirely in California and Utah, around Bakersfield and Moab, between June and August 1990. This route follows the story in film order through six real places: a Long Beach bar, a Los Angeles motel, a Colorado general store, the desert at Arches, the ghost town of Cisco and the cliff edge at Dead Horse Point. Almost all of them stand in for somewhere else, and each stop says where.

6 locations5/6 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Vertigo: Hitchcock's San Francisco

A retired detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a friend's wife around San Francisco, because her husband fears she is possessed by Carlotta Valdes, a woman who died in 1857. Hitchcock's 1958 thriller was shot on location in San Francisco, at Mission San Juan Bautista, in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, at Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. This route follows the story in film order through nine places: a vanished restaurant, a Nob Hill apartment block, a mission cemetery and an art museum, a fort under the Golden Gate Bridge, a coastal kiss, a mission bell tower and a hotel with a green neon sign.

9 locations7/9 visitable

MoviesApproximate

The Talented Mr. Ripley: Ischia to Venice

Tom Ripley is paid $1,000 to travel to Italy and persuade Dickie Greenleaf to return to the United States. Claiming to be a former Princeton classmate, he slides into Dickie's life, and a friendship at the seaside turns into a trail of lies and killings. The route follows the film's order through Ischia and Procida, Anzio, Naples, Rome and Venice. Many places play other places: Ischia and Procida stand in for the fictional village of Mongibello, Anzio plays San Remo, and the "Roman" opera house is in Naples.

8 locations8/8 visitable

MoviesApproximate

The Sopranos: Tony's New Jersey

Tony Soprano's mob is a New Jersey one, and the series made a point of it: the majority of its exterior scenes were filmed on location in the state, with most interiors built at Silvercup Studios in New York. The route follows the opening titles from the Pulaski Skyway to the Soprano house, then the pork store, the Great Falls, the Bada Bing, the Pine Barrens and the diner of the finale. The Pine Barrens episode was filmed in New York, and the house is a private home, so its pin marks only the borough.

7 locations4/7 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Twin Peaks: From the Falls to the Double R

Twin Peaks is set five miles from the Canadian border, but its exteriors come from the Snoqualmie Valley, all around 25–30 miles from Seattle. David Lynch and Mark Frost found the places they had written into the pilot in Snoqualmie, North Bend and Fall City. This route follows the series through five of them: the falls from the opening titles, the road with the welcome sign, the hotel, the sheriff's station and the diner. Most interiors were built on sets in a San Fernando Valley warehouse, so these stops are exteriors, and the Reinig Road pin marks the road, not one spot.

5 locations4/5 visitable

HistoryApproximate

Napoleon's Hundred Days: From Elba to Waterloo

On 26 February 1815 Napoleon slipped away from Elba with some 1,000 men. Within a month he was back in the Tuileries, and by mid-July he had surrendered to the Royal Navy. The route follows him stop by stop: his villa on Elba, the landing at Golfe-Juan, the meeting at Laffrey and the entry into Grenoble on the Route Napoléon, the Tuileries, the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte at Waterloo, then Malmaison and Île d'Aix, where his journey ended. The pins at Golfe-Juan and Grenoble mark the towns, not exact spots.

9 locations7/9 visitable

BooksFictional

The Great Gatsby: From the Eggs to the Plaza

Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby on two invented peninsulas, West Egg and East Egg, but he built them from the Long Island he knew in Great Neck, where he lived from October 1922. Behind the glamour sit a dump, a station and a hotel suite that were all real. This route follows Nick from the Eggs through the valley of ashes, Penn Station, the Queensboro Bridge and the Plaza Hotel. The Eggs, the valley and Gatsby's house are invented, so their pins mark the real places the novel is read against.

7 locations4/7 visitable

BooksApproximate

Murder on the Orient Express: From Aleppo to the Snowdrift

Hercule Poirot is on his way home to London when the Orient Express, fully booked and unusually crowded for the season, stops in a snowdrift in Yugoslavia with a murdered man aboard and the killer still on the train. The route follows the story from Aleppo station through Istanbul, where Poirot gets his telegram and his berth, and Belgrade to the snowdrift near Vinkovci. It ends with the 1932 kidnapping that gave Christie her plot. Most pins are indicative: the novel names few exact places.

6 locations1/6 visitable

GamesApproximate

Assassin's Creed III: The American Revolution

In 1754 a British gentleman, Haytham Kenway, kills a man at the opera in London and carries a stolen key to the American colonies. He is a Templar. His son, Connor, grows up to become the Assassin who hunts him across the American Revolution — through the Boston Massacre and the tea ships, the first shots at Lexington, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, Monmouth and finally New York. Assassin's Creed III builds its America from real maps, and almost every stop can still be walked: the opera house in Covent Garden, the Old State House and Boston Harbor, the green at Lexington and the bridge at Concord, the Bunker Hill battlefield, the Valley Forge encampment, the Monmouth battlefield, and the Battery at the foot of Manhattan, where the war ends.

9 locations9/9 visitable

GamesFictional

Watch Dogs 2: Hacking the Bay Area

In Watch Dogs 2, the hacker Marcus Holloway and his crew DedSec set out to bring down the surveillance network run by the Blume corporation, across a fictional Bay Area that recreates San Francisco, Oakland, Marin County and Silicon Valley. Their campaign of break-ins and leaks plays out at real landmarks and at parodies of the region's tech giants. This route follows the places where the story's operations happen, from Coit Tower and Embarcadero Center to Sutro Tower, the Googleplex, Ubisoft's own studio, the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz.

7 locations3/7 visitable

GamesApproximate

L.A. Noire: 1947 Los Angeles, Street by Street

L.A. Noire rebuilds Los Angeles in 1947 with fanatical care: the studio mapped the real streets, modelled building interiors on the originals, and filled the map with the city's landmarks. Detective Cole Phelps drives that recreation through traffic, homicide, vice and arson cases, and much of the city he moves through is still standing. This tour follows the real places behind the game's map, from Union Station and Bunker Hill to Wilshire's art deco and the Hollywood movie palaces, then down to the river where the story ends. Every pin marks a real site the game put on its streets.

8 locations8/8 visitable

MoviesExact

Stranger Things: Hawkins in Georgia

Hawkins, Indiana, is the town where nothing ever happens — until a boy vanishes and a girl walks out of the woods. None of it is real Indiana. The show built Hawkins out of small-town Georgia: the square in Jackson, a shuttered psychiatric hospital near Atlanta, a dead shopping mall in Duluth. This route follows the real stand-ins, from the laboratory where the story begins to the quarry, the school, the Starcourt Mall, the mansion that became the Creel House, and the Vilnius prison that stood in for Kamchatka.

8 locations3/8 visitable

MoviesFictional

Tenet: From the Kyiv Opera to Stalsk-12

A CIA officer called the Protagonist joins Tenet, a secret organisation fighting a war across time. Inverted bullets and a Russian oligarch named Sator pull him from a Kyiv opera house to Mumbai, Oslo, the Amalfi Coast and Tallinn, chasing a device sent back from the future. This route follows the film's real locations: Tallinn's Linnahall standing in for the Kyiv opera house, Colaba in Mumbai, the Oslo freeport sequence, the gardens of Villa Cimbrone above Amalfi, the Tallinn streets of the car chase and the California ghost town used for Stalsk-12. The Oslo Freeport and Stalsk-12 are fictional, so their pins mark the real places the film points to.

6 locations4/6 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Oppenheimer: From Cambridge to Trinity

J. Robert Oppenheimer studies in Cambridge and Göttingen, builds a physics school at Berkeley, and is handed the one job nobody else wants: build the atomic bomb before the Nazis do. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023) follows him from the Cavendish Laboratory to a secret mesa in New Mexico, through the Trinity test and the political fallout that ends his career. This route follows the film's real places — Cambridge, Göttingen, LeConte Hall, Los Alamos, Trinity, the White House, the Institute for Advanced Study and the room where his security clearance was revoked. The film's own stand-ins, from Ghost Ranch to Kerckhoff Hall, Belen and Alhambra, are noted at each stop.

8 locations7/8 visitable

MoviesExact

The Dark Knight: Chicago as Gotham and Hong Kong

Gotham is Chicago. The film shot most of Batman's city on real streets and buildings in the Loop, dressing them up as Gotham, then flew the crew to Hong Kong for its one overseas detour. This route follows The Dark Knight in order, from the bank heist that opens it to the rooftop where Batman and the Joker have their last fight. Along the way: the disused post office that doubled as a bank, the glass office where Wayne holds a fundraiser, the financial street of the convoy chase, the hospital the Joker destroys, an old Chicago bar, the pier where two ferries wait, and Hong Kong's International Finance Centre.

8 locations6/8 visitable