50 First Dates is set and mostly filmed on Oʻahu, Hawaii: Henry Roth works at Sea Life Park, near Makapuʻu Point, and falls for Lucy Whitmore, who loses every day's memories overnight. Kāneʻohe Bay, Laie, Kualoa Ranch and Makapuʻu Point's lighthouse all appear.
The route follows Henry's courtship from the film's opening shot of the islet Mokoliʻi to a first kiss by the lighthouse. Some interiors, such as the walrus habitat, were shot in California, and the café's exact filming spot is uncertain.
In the spring of 1989, Henry leaves Boulder for a summer job as a fire lookout in Wyoming's Shoshone National Forest. His only company is Delilah, the voice on the other end of a walkie-talkie, until fireworks at a lake, a ransacked tower and a fenced research camp turn the job into a mystery.
The route follows the game's places and the real Wyoming behind them: the bar where Henry meets Julia, the Cody rodeo the characters talk about, the Shoshone forest still marked by the 1988 Yellowstone fires, and stand-ins for the fictional Two Forks tower, Jonesy Lake, Wapiti Station, Cave 452 and Thorofare Lookout.
inFAMOUS 2 builds New Marais from real New Orleans: the French Quarter, Bayou St. John, Oak Alley, Fort Jackson and the Lower Ninth Ward. Cole MacGrath flees ruined Empire City to a Louisiana city ruled by the demagogue Joseph Bertrand and needs a scientist, a device and power cores to beat the Beast.
New Marais is Sucker Punch's New Orleans: a fictional city assembled from the French Quarter, above-ground cemeteries, plantation houses, a Civil War fort, the bayous and the flooded districts left by a hurricane. This route follows Cole's story through seven of those stand-ins, from the swamp where he lands to the cathedral tower where the game ends.
In August 2010 a Bohemia Interactive team went to Lemnos to gather references, and came back with the material for Altis, the island where Arma 3 is set. Two years later two of the studio's developers were arrested on the same island and held for 129 days on suspicion of spying. After the arrest the game's main island, until then called Limnos, was renamed Altis; Stratis kept its name.
The route follows the real island from Myrina and its castle, past a church with no roof and a miniature desert, to the airport and the old Allied base at Moudros, then across the water to Agios Efstratios. Arma 3's war is set in 2034–2035; the harbours, theatre and dunes are not.
Ragnar Lothbrok goes from farmer to king in History's Vikings, a series that sprints through more than a century of Viking Age history and the sagas. This route follows the places of its events in story order, setting what the show does against what history and the sagas say. The series itself was filmed in Ireland.
From a raid on Lindisfarne to Paris under siege, a snake pit near York, a Mediterranean raid, a colony in Iceland and a court in Kiev and a voyage west, with the fictional village of Kattegat left unpinned.
A search for the Land of Cinnamon turned into the first descent of the Amazon from the Andes to the sea. Francisco de Orellana, with the friar Gaspar de Carvajal as chronicler, followed unmapped rivers, fought off warriors on the banks and gave the river the name it still carries.
The route runs from Quito to the Napo, the Rio Negro, the Amazon's mouth and the pearl island of Cubagua. River stops are approximate, and dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar still in use then.
Nikolay Przhevalsky made one expedition to the Ussuri region and four to Central Asia, crossing the Gobi, reaching the wandering lake of Lop Nur and getting within 260 km of Lhasa. He died at Karakol on Lake Issyk-Kul, on the eve of a fifth journey.
This route follows six stops from those journeys and his years between them. They were separate expeditions rather than one trip, so the markers are not joined. Dates are years only.
Vitus Bering's Kamchatka expeditions went from Saint Petersburg through Tobolsk and Okhotsk to the Bering Strait and Bering Island. In 1725 the Russian naval captain set out across a continent to find out whether Asia and America were joined.
The route follows seven places from the Tsar's order in Saint Petersburg to Bering's death on an uninhabited island in 1741. The stops are not one continuous line, so they are shown as separate markers. Dates are Old Style (Julian), as Russian records of the time kept them; the modern calendar runs 11 days ahead.
In September 1799 the Russian field marshal Suvorov led his army into Switzerland to join the Allied forces, only to find his allies failing him. He fought through the Alps, crossed high passes and ended in Chur.
The route follows the march from Taverne to Chur. Dates are Gregorian (New Style), and pins mark villages or passes rather than battlefields.
The Kojiki, Japan's oldest surviving book, sets its myths in real places: Izumo, which yielded the land, the cave at Takachiho where Amaterasu hid, Kirishima, one candidate for her grandson's descent, and Ise, said to keep her mirror.
This route follows that story to seven places, from Izumo to Takachiho, Kirishima and Ise. The myth is what the text tells; the shrine foundings and excavations are documented history, and each stop keeps the two apart. Several sites are traditional identifications that rival places also claim.
Japan's Kumano Kodō runs from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu to Kumano Hongū Taisha, then by boat to Shingū and on to Nachi's stone steps and falls. For over a thousand years emperors, samurai and commoners walked these trails to the three grand shrines; Go-Shirakawa made the trip 34 times.
This route follows the Nakahechi from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu and Hongū, by river to Shingū, then to Nachi's stone steps and waterfall. Some stops are pinned to the area rather than a surveyed spot.
On 26 August 1768 the Endeavour left Plymouth with 94 people aboard, bound for Tahiti to watch Venus cross the Sun. Almost three years later she anchored off the Kent coast again, having reached New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and with many of her people lost to disease on the way home.
The route follows James Cook's own journal and modern accounts through ten stops, from the anchorage at Plymouth to the Great Barrier Reef and Batavia. Dates follow modern accounts, which sometimes differ by a day from the journal.
HBO's Game of Thrones prequel was filmed primarily in the United Kingdom, and its Velaryon world is Cornish: the island seat of Driftmark is a tidal island, and the Stepstones war camp is a cove on the Lizard peninsula. For the capital and the free city of Pentos, the crew went to western and southern Spain.
The route follows the story from the Stepstones war (season 1, episode 3) through the Driftmark episodes to King's Landing in season 2. Sources do not name the exact streets used in Cáceres, so that pin marks the old town.
On 20 September 1519 five ships and about 270 men sailed from Spain to find a western sea road to the Spice Islands. Magellan died in the Philippines, but Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the Victoria home three years later with eighteen survivors and 26 tons of spices, having sailed all the way around the world.
The route follows the voyage from the mouth of the Guadalquivir past Port St. Julian, through the strait and across the Pacific to the Moluccas, then home past the Cape of Good Hope. Anchorages are often unrecorded, so most pins mark the nearest known place; the dates come from Pigafetta's journal and modern accounts.
Kalos is Metropolitan France turned into a star-shaped Pokémon region. Lumiose City is inspired by Paris, its Prism Tower by the Eiffel Tower and its art museum by the Louvre; the Battle Château recalls Chenonceau on the Loire, the palais Chaydeuvre is the château de Versailles, and the stones outside Geosenge Town are the Carnac stones. The games never confirm their models — these are fan and encyclopaedia identifications — so every pin on this route is speculative.
The route follows the story across the real France behind Kalos: the town where the adventure begins, Lumiose's iron tower, two châteaux and a royal palace, a coastal aquarium, the island tower where Mega Evolution is learned, the cathedral clock behind Anistar's sundial, the Breton megalith field where Team Flare hides its ultimate weapon, and an abandoned mine where the legendary Zygarde sleeps.
In 1977 Robyn Davidson, then in her twenties, walked about 2,700 kilometres from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean with four camels and her dog, crossing some of the emptiest desert on earth. She had spent two years in Alice Springs learning to train wild camels. She had no plan to write about it, but a National Geographic article and photographs by Rick Smolan made her famous, and her 1980 book Tracks became a classic, filmed in 2013.
The route follows her line west across the Northern Territory and Western Australia in order. Much of it crosses Aboriginal land, where she travelled with a Pitjantjatjara elder, Mr Eddie; pins mark communities and stations, not sacred sites.
In spring 1689 the poet Matsuo Bashō gave up his hut in Edo and set off on foot with his friend and disciple Kawai Sora into Oku, the remote north of Japan. For about 156 days and some 2,400 kilometres they walked to the places the old poets had made famous — a barrier gate, a bay of pine islands, a battlefield, a mountain temple — and Bashō answered them with haiku.
The travel diary he made of it, Oku no Hosomichi, published in 1702, is one of the classics of Japanese literature, and its stops are still pilgrimage sites. Bashō polished the facts for art; Sora's own diary shows where. Dates follow the old lunar calendar, so they are given here by season.
The Boshin War ran from Kyoto to Hakodate in eighteen months: the battlefield at Toba, Edo Castle, the hill of Ueno, Aizu's castle and Goryōkaku. In January 1868 the young emperor was declared ruler in fact as well as name, ending more than 250 years of Tokugawa rule, and the last shogun's supporters fought on until a breakaway republic made its last stand.
The route follows that war in six places, all of them visitable: the battlefield at Toba, Edo Castle, the hill of Ueno, Aizu's castle and the hill where its teenage soldiers died, and Goryōkaku. Dates are given in the Western calendar, converted from the Japanese lunar dates used at the time.
On 12 March 1930 Mahatma Gandhi, aged 60, walked out of his ashram in Ahmedabad with 78 followers, heading for the sea. His target was the British monopoly on salt, a tax that touched every Indian household. Twenty-four days and about 385 kilometres later, on a beach at Dandi, he picked up a lump of salty mud and broke the law — and millions followed.
The route follows the march south through Gujarat in its real order, with the dates from the day-by-day itinerary: the ashram, the first night's halt, the Kheda country, Borsad, Surat and Dandi, where a memorial now stands. The final stop covers what came next: Gandhi's arrest and the beatings at the Dharasana salt works that shocked the world.
