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.
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.
In April 1947 the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl and five companions pushed off from Peru on a raft of nine balsa logs, built in the style of old Spanish drawings of South American rafts. They meant to prove that ancient people could have drifted from South America to Polynesia. After 101 days and almost 7,000 kilometres on the open Pacific, they crashed onto a coral reef in the Tuamotus — and all six walked ashore.
The voyage became a bestselling book and an Oscar-winning documentary. Heyerdahl's theory, though, has not survived: archaeology, language and genetics show that Polynesians came from the west, from Island Southeast Asia, as master navigators. The route follows the raft from Callao to Tahiti.
On 18 June 1937 three Soviet airmen took off from Moscow in a single-engine plane and landed in Washington State more than 63 hours later, having flown over the North Pole. It was the first non-stop flight from the Soviet Union to the United States.
The route follows the crew from the airfield near Shchyolkovo to the landing at Pearson Field, then to the general's table, the White House and the monument that still stands by the runway. The path over the Arctic is shown only as a symbolic pin.
In autumn 1988 the BBC sent Michael Palin round the globe in the footsteps of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, with no aircraft allowed. It began and ended at the Reform Club in London and ran from 25 September to 12 December.
The route follows nine moments from his own day-by-day captions and diary excerpts: Venice, the Pyramids, a dhow from Dubai to Bombay, Hong Kong, a train to Shanghai, the Pacific, an Aspen balloon and a locked door in Pall Mall. Pins mark cities and landmarks; the real line of travel ran between them.
In 1937 Amelia Earhart tried to become the first woman to fly around the world, on a roughly equatorial route. Two attempts, a crash in Hawaii and a lost radio signal over the Pacific turned her flight into one of history's great mysteries.
The route follows both attempts, from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae and Howland Island, and ends at Nikumaroro, where one theory says she and her navigator came down. That final stop is only a hypothesis.
In 1725 a Russian naval captain set out across a continent to answer one question: are Asia and America joined? Vitus Bering's two Kamchatka expeditions, the second of them part of the Great Northern Expedition, took years of hardship to answer it.
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 1613 a samurai from Sendai set out to Mexico in a galleon built for the mission to meet the King of Spain and the Pope. Hasekura Tsunenaga's embassy took seven years, crossed Mexico and the ocean, and came home to a Japan that was closing its doors to Christianity.
The route follows him from the port of Tsukinoura through Acapulco, Mexico City, Havana, Madrid, Saint-Tropez and Rome, then back via Manila to Nagasaki. Japanese dates are given in the Gregorian calendar. Most pins mark towns or harbours, not documented buildings.
On 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; three days later, another on Nagasaki. This route follows the two days on the ground, from the bridge that served as the aiming point to the places that survived or were rebuilt.
It starts in Hiroshima at Aioi Bridge, the hypocenter and the Dome, then moves to Nagasaki's hypocenter, cathedral and shrine, and ends with the two museums and parks built in 1955. Death tolls are estimates and are given as the ranges researchers publish.
In January 1817 General José de San Martín led an army out of Mendoza and over the Andes to free Chile from Spanish rule. The crossing took 21 days, and the feat has been compared to Hannibal's and Napoleon's crossings of the Alps.
The route follows the campaign from the hill monument in Mendoza and the El Plumerillo camp, over the two passes the columns used, to the victories at Chacabuco and Maipú. The mountain stops are pinned approximately; the passes are long, and the army's exact tracks are not.
Team Ninja's open-world samurai game drops a masterless Blade Twin into the last years of the shogunate. Between 1858 and 1868 the story runs from Yokohama's foreign quarter through the killing of a Chief Minister to Kyoto's Shinsengumi and a plot to burn Edo.
This route follows the game's main story through seven places, from the port to the capital, pairing each scene with the real site that history ties to it. Where the game names only a district, the pin marks the nearest well-known landmark.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Forza Horizon 5 drops the Horizon Festival into a fictionalised Mexico, on a map 50% larger than Forza Horizon 4's. Creative director Mike Brown calls Mexico almost the whole world in one country: snowy peaks, tropical jungles, epic canyons, beautiful beaches, ancient architecture and modern cities.
This route visits seven real places the game recreates, from a sea arch at the tip of Baja to a canyon with a train, and says what the game does at each. The map is a condensed Mexico, so the pins mark the real sites, not their positions in the game.
You start in a quiet town, pick a starter, beat eight gym leaders and take on Team Rocket. The Kanto of Pokémon Red and Blue is invented, yet it is based on the real Kantō region of Japan, and fans have spent decades matching its towns to real places.
This route follows the game's journey from Pallet Town to the final gym and sets each stop beside the real place it is said to resemble. The game's Kanto is inspired by the real one, not a copy of it, so every pin is an outside reading of the map, not an official location.
Rachel Chu, a Chinese American economics professor, flies to Singapore with her boyfriend Nick for his best friend's wedding and learns that Nick's family is among the richest in the country. Jon M. Chu's 2018 film follows her from the airport to a mahjong table where she faces down his mother.
This route visits nine places from the film, in story order. Several of the story's places were filmed in Malaysia instead of Singapore: the Young family estate in Kuala Lumpur, the island parties on Langkawi and the mahjong parlor in Penang.
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.
A jazz pianist and an aspiring actress argue through the windows of their cars in a Los Angeles traffic jam, and the city itself becomes the romance: a night on a funicular, a broken projector, a kiss in a planetarium. Damien Chazelle shot La La Land in 40 days across Los Angeles in the summer of 2015, and most of the places the couple reaches for are still there.
This route follows Mia and Sebastian from the freeway ramps where they shout at each other to the jazz bar Seb finally gets to open — the 105/110 connector ramps, the Burbank café on the Warner lot, the Lighthouse Café and the pier beside it, the Rialto in South Pasadena, Griffith Observatory and Angels Flight. The film rarely names its own locations, so a few pins mark the real building that stood in for the one on screen.
Los Santos feels like Los Angeles because it is Los Angeles, compressed. Grand Theft Auto V squeezes the city's most famous miles into one playable map, from a hillside sign to a Venice boardwalk.
This tour visits seven real stand-ins behind the fiction: the hillside sign, a movie palace, a luxury shopping street, an observatory, a pier, a beach and a towered folk-art park. Every pin marks the real place, and each stop names the game location it doubles for. Expect crowds at the beach and on Hollywood Boulevard, and quiet at the towers.
In December 1831 a 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with a passion for beetles and rocks sailed from Plymouth as an unpaid naturalist on HMS Beagle, a ten-gun survey brig. The voyage was meant to take two years and took five. Charles Darwin came home with crates of fossils, skins and notebooks — and with questions about the islands that would lead him, two decades later, to On the Origin of Species.
The route follows the ship around the world in order, using Darwin's own Journal of Researches for dates and details: the volcanic Cape Verde islands, the Brazilian forest, the fossil beds of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, a great Chilean earthquake, the Galápagos, Cape Town and home to Falmouth.
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.
On the evening of 2 October 1872, the punctual and unflappable Phileas Fogg bets his fellow members of the Reform Club £20,000 — half his fortune — that he can go around the world in eighty days, and leaves that same night with his new French valet, Passepartout. On his heels comes Detective Fix, convinced that Fogg is a bank robber on the run. Jules Verne's novel appeared in 1872, when the opening of the Suez Canal and new railways across India and America had made such a race against the timetable just about possible.
The route follows the journey eastward in the novel's own dates, from Pall Mall back to Pall Mall.
