Sir John Franklin's 1845 search for the Northwest Passage began at Stromness in Orkney, passed Disko Bay in Greenland and Beechey Island, and ended off King William Island, where HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were trapped in ice in 1846. No one from the expedition came home.
The route follows the ships from Orkney to the Victory Point note, the last message the crew left, then to the two wrecks found in 2014 and 2016. Most Arctic stops are remote or protected, so treat them as map stories rather than places to visit.
The California Gold Rush began at Sutter's Mill in Coloma in January 1848 and spread to Sacramento, San Francisco, Placerville and the boomtown of Columbia.
The route follows the news from a sawmill tailrace to a crowd in a San Francisco square, then to two mining towns where the rush turned into streets, aqueducts and brick buildings. Most stops can still be visited, though the Placerville pin is only the main street.
The Bourne Trilogy: Zurich's safe deposit box, the Paris car chase and Tangier's medina. A man with no memory is hunted by a CIA programme that wants him gone.
The route follows the three films in order, from Zurich and Paris through Mykonos, Berlin and Moscow to London and Tangier. Several cities were stand-ins for others, so the pins mark the story's places or honest approximations.
The Count of Monte Cristo on a map: from Notre-Dame de la Garde in Marseille to the Château d'If, the island of Monte Cristo and its treasure, Rome's catacombs and the Paris of the count's revenge. A young sailor is arrested at his own engagement party, escapes in a dead man's burial sack and comes back as a count to settle accounts.
Most of the stops can be visited; the island of Monte Cristo is a nature reserve with a years-long waiting list, and several scenes happen in places Dumas invented, so those pins mark the real landmark nearby.
Ida Pfeiffer's 1846–1848 journey around the world passed through Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Tahiti and Baghdad, as her own book A Woman's Journey Round the World recounts. A 48-year-old Viennese widow with little money, she travelled mostly alone by cargo ship, horseback and caravan, and came home to a Vienna in revolution.
The route follows her first world journey in order, from her own book, A Woman's Journey Round the World: Hamburg, the Brazilian forest, Cape Horn and Valparaíso, Tahiti, Canton, Baghdad, Persia and home. There are no visitor tips for Iraq or Iran.
The Oregon Trail follows real landmarks of the 2,170-mile trail: Independence, Missouri, Chimney Rock in Nebraska, Independence Rock in Wyoming and Oregon City at the end. Three student teachers in Minneapolis wrote it in 1971; the 1985 Apple II version, set in 1848, made buying oxen, fording rivers and dying of dysentery a classroom staple, and the series has sold more than 65 million copies.
The route follows the game's stops from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, with what stands at each place today.
