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.
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.
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.
Liberty City is New York with the labels peeled off. Grand Theft Auto IV rebuilds four of the boroughs, borrows New Jersey for the state across the river, and copies in the Statue of Liberty, the Coney Island Cyclone, the Manhattan Bridge, Times Square and the Empire State Building — then renames nearly all of them, so the game's Liberty statue holds a takeaway coffee instead of a torch. The story is set in 2008, the year the game arrived.
This route pins nine real places behind those names: the triumphal arch at Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza, the wooden Cyclone at Coney Island, the Manhattan Bridge as the Algonquin Bridge, Brighton Beach as Hove Beach, the surviving 1964 World's Fair site in Queens, and three Manhattan landmarks — Middle Park, Star Junction and the Rotterdam Tower. Each stop names the in-game location it stands in for. One caveat: Rockstar deliberately avoided a precise recreation of New York, so expect the landmarks, not the street plan.
In 1888 Nellie Bly, the star reporter of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, proposed turning Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days into fact. On 14 November 1889, with two days' notice and as little luggage as she could manage, she sailed from Hoboken to beat Phileas Fogg's fictional record. She came home 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes later, a world record — briefly — and a celebrity, while the World's readers guessed her arrival time to the second.
The route follows her book of 1890, stop by stop, with the dates from her own record. She went east by steamer and train, through the Suez Canal and the British ports of Asia.
Between 1947 and 1950 Sal Paradise, a young writer from New Jersey, crosses America again and again — hitchhiking, by bus and in borrowed cars — usually in pursuit of his wild, magnetic friend Dean Moriarty. Jack Kerouac typed the story on a continuous scroll of paper in three weeks in April 1951, and it was published in 1957. Sal is Kerouac, Dean is Neal Cassady, and most of the trips really happened.
The route picks out the places the novel names, from a rainy false start on the Hudson to Mexico City and back to a New York street corner. The novel gives towns and streets rather than addresses, so most pins mark areas, not doors.
