Hawkins, Indiana, is the town where nothing ever happens — until a boy vanishes and a girl walks out of the woods. None of it is real Indiana. The show built Hawkins out of small-town Georgia: the square in Jackson, a shuttered psychiatric hospital near Atlanta, a dead shopping mall in Duluth.
This route follows the real stand-ins, from the laboratory where the story begins to the quarry, the school, the Starcourt Mall, the mansion that became the Creel House, and the Vilnius prison that stood in for Kamchatka.
Before the white whale there is a cold December and a wrong turn at the docks. Ishmael arrives in New Bedford to find the Nantucket packet gone, rents half a bed at the Spouter-Inn, sits through a sermon on Jonah, crosses to Nantucket and signs aboard the Pequod, which leaves on Christmas Day.
New Bedford had overtaken Nantucket as the country's top whaling port by 1840, yet Ishmael is set on sailing from the island. The route follows his first chapters. The inn, the Try Pots and the Pequod are invented, so their pins mark real places that stand in for them; the chapel is real.
A young English solicitor travels to the Carpathians to sell a London house to a nobleman — and becomes his prisoner. The Count then ships himself to England in fifty boxes of earth, comes ashore in a Yorkshire storm and starts hunting in London, until a small band led by Professor Van Helsing chases him all the way back to his mountains.
Stoker never visited Transylvania; he built its geography from books and maps, and the English half from places he knew. The route follows the novel's diaries and letters stop by stop: the inn at Bistritz, the Borgo Pass, the Black Sea port of Varna, the harbour, steps and churchyard of Whitby, Purfleet on the Thames, London Zoo and the final race up the Danube at Galatz.
Before the Minotaur, there was the road. Theseus grew up in Troezen, never knowing his father; when he was old enough to lift a great stone and take the sword and sandals hidden beneath it, he set out to find him in Athens. The safe way was by sea. He chose the coast road round the Saronic Gulf instead, which was infested with bandits, and dealt with each one in the way they had treated travellers.
The route follows the six labours of that journey as Plutarch tells them in his Life of Theseus, written around AD 100 from much older tales. The places are real; the giants and robbers belong to myth, and several sites are traditional guesses.
