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.
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.
Forza Horizon 4, released on 2 October 2018, turns Great Britain into one giant racetrack: an open world with condensed representations of Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and the Cotswolds, where seasons change every week and Derwentwater freezes hard enough to drive across. Microsoft counted 24 million players by November 2020, and Polygon found the game world a theme-park version of England where everything has "the faint whiff of an idealised 1950s about it, a place of ordered pub gardens and rosebushes".
This route drives the real Britain behind the game, north to south: Edinburgh's Old Town, Bamburgh Castle on its coastal crag, three Lake District stops at Derwentwater, Ambleside and Tarn Hows, and the honey-coloured village of Broadway in the Cotswolds. Every stop can be visited today.
In January 1868 Japan's young emperor was declared ruler in fact as well as name, ending more than 250 years of Tokugawa shogunate. The last shogun's supporters did not give up quietly. For eighteen months a civil war rolled north from the edge of Kyoto to Edo, into the mountains of Aizu and finally to a star-shaped fortress on Hokkaido, where a short-lived 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.
