Pearl Harbor and Midway tell the Pacific war's first six months: the Japanese attack on Battleship Row and the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii on 7 December 1941, then the naval battle at Midway Atoll in June 1942 that sank four Japanese carriers.
The route runs from Ford Island and Hickam Field to the codebreakers of Station HYPO, the fighting at Midway and the wreck of USS Yorktown on the seabed. Pearl Harbor stops can be visited; Midway Atoll is remote and the Yorktown wreck lies on the deep seabed.
The Olympian gods' birthplaces are scattered across Greece: Zeus in a cave on Crete or on Mount Lykaion, Apollo and Artemis on Delos, Apollo's oracle at Delphi, and the gods' home on Mount Olympus.
The route follows the myths from Zeus's cradle to the mountain where the gods live. Ancient authors disagreed about where Zeus was born, so those first two stops are traditional claims, not proven sites.
From 1968 Carlos Castaneda published best-sellers about his apprenticeship to don Juan Matus, a Yaqui sorcerer from Sonora: peyote, power, and finally a leap into an abyss. They came out as anthropology and earned him UCLA degrees. Most scholars now read them as fiction, and the author reinvented his own life story too.
This route follows two maps at once. One holds the places the records confirm: Cajamarca, Lima, UCLA and Westwood. The other holds the places the books name, from a Greyhound depot in Nogales to a bench in Oaxaca and the Toltec warriors of Tula. Each stop's accuracy label tells you which map it belongs to.
