In 1648 Semyon Dezhnyov sailed from the Kolyma River past Cape Dezhnev and through the Bering Strait, eighty years before Vitus Bering entered the strait in 1728, and ended up wrecked near the mouth of the Anadyr.
The route follows the voyage from Srednekolymsk to the cape, the Diomede Islands, the Anadyr mouth and the winter quarters at Anadyrsk. Some details, including the exact route, are debated, so most pins are approximate.
John Muir's 1867 walk from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico passed Mammoth Cave, the Cumberland Mountains, Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery and Cedar Key. He told it in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf.
The route follows the book from Louisville to Florida, then on to Yosemite Valley in 1868. Some stops are general areas rather than exact spots, as marked on each point.
Florence's Renaissance is packed into a few streets: the Duomo and Brunelleschi's dome, the Medici palace, Piazza della Signoria, the Uffizi and the Ponte Vecchio. Each stop here ties one building to a dated event, from a dome competition in 1418 to Michelangelo's David arriving at the Accademia in 1873.
The walk follows the buildings in date order, from the cathedral to the Accademia, and every stop can be visited. Dates mark the event at each place, not a single journey.
Miyamoto Musashi, Japan's most famous swordsman, moves through this route from the Sekigahara campaign of 1600 to the duel on Ganryū Island, Osaka Castle, Kumamoto Castle and the cave of Reigandō, where he wrote The Book of Five Rings.
The route follows the biography stop by stop, from a village birthplace that sources place in two provinces to the cave where he spent his last years. Several details, including his role at Sekigahara and Osaka, are debated or rest on later accounts.
Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk is set in Prague, in the pub U Kalicha on Na Bojišti, and in Tábor, Putim, České Budějovice and Bruck an der Leitha, on Švejk's way to the front.
The route follows Švejk from his Prague local, by train and on foot through South Bohemia, to the town on the Austria–Hungary border where the regiment is stationed.
The Pokrovsky Gate (1982) is set in 1950s Moscow near the Boulevard Ring, and its real locations include a house on Nashchokinsky Lane, Patriarch Ponds, the Hermitage Garden and a Stalinist high-rise on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment.
Mikhail Kozakov's film, made for television by Mosfilm, follows a student, Kostik, and his neighbours in a communal flat. The six stops run from the house to the rink, the bandshell and the hospital. The flat's interior was built in a Mosfilm pavilion, so only the exteriors are real.
Run Lola Run is set and filmed in Berlin: a U-Bahn station, the bank at Bebelplatz, the Oberbaum Bridge and a casino in Schöneberg's town hall.
Lola has 20 minutes to find 100,000 marks and save Manni, and the film replays them three times. This route follows the story through the real places where those scenes were shot, from the platform where the money is lost to the casino table where number 20 comes up twice. The film's own geography is loose, so the stops are filming sites rather than a running route.
Sally Rooney's Normal People is set in County Sligo and at Trinity College Dublin, but the television series was shot in a school in Clonsilla, the pubs of Tubbercurry, Trinity itself, a villa in Lazio and a frozen coast at Luleå.
The route follows Marianne and Connell from their last school days to university and abroad. Several stops are stand-ins for places the story names, and each says so.
Bridget Jones's Diary is set and filmed around Borough Market in south London, with Shad Thames, the Royal Courts of Justice and Cornhill on the way. The film moves Bridget from Holland Park to a flat above the Globe pub, where the story begins.
This route follows the film's story through eight London and country locations: the book launch at the ICA, the first date at Shad Thames, the mini-break at Stoke Park, the anniversary party at Syon House and the snowy finale. The film was shot over six weeks in and around London in 2000.
Hitchcock's North by Northwest starts at the Plaza Hotel and the United Nations in New York, rolls through Grand Central and Chicago's LaSalle Street Station, and ends on Mount Rushmore. Its crop-duster scene, set in Indiana, was filmed near Wasco, California.
An advertising man is mistaken for a spy who does not exist and has to run across the country. The route follows him stop by stop, from the Oak Room to the Chicago hotel where Hitchcock stayed, and says which scenes were real locations and which were sets or stand-ins.
Out of Africa was filmed around Nairobi and the Ngong Hills in Kenya, with the Danish scenes shot at Castle Rising in Norfolk, England. Sydney Pollack's 1985 film, based on Karen Blixen's memoir, uses the Muthaiga Country Club, the coffee farm that is now the Karen Blixen Museum and the Chyulu Hills standing in for the Ngong Hills.
This route follows Blixen's years in Kenya and the places the film made famous: the railway museum whose locomotive pulls the opening train, the club where Farah is turned away, the farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills, the Norfolk castle that plays Denmark, Voi Airport where Denys Finch Hatton's plane went down, and the obelisk grave on the hillside above Nairobi.
The Handmaid's Tale was filmed in Toronto, Hamilton and Cambridge, Ontario: the Waterford house, the hanging wall at Mill Race Park and the Royal York's Jezebel's stand in for Gilead and Boston.
The route follows the first season in order: the Waterford house, the Red Center, June's flashback at Ripley's Aquarium, the wall, the Main Street Bridge, the Grand Café, the Lower Bay subway, the handmaids lined up at LIUNA Station and the banquet at the Royal York.
First Blood turns Hope, British Columbia into Hope, Washington: Wallace Street is the main street, the 3rd Avenue railway crossing is the motorcycle leap, and the Othello Tunnels stand in for Chapman Gorge. The 1982 film was shot almost entirely in and around the town, with its mountains and canyon doing the work of the story's backcountry.
The route follows John Rambo from the Pitt River cabin where he learns his old army buddy has died, through his arrest and escape in Hope, the manhunt above Coquihalla Canyon, and the National Guard headquarters at Golden Ears Park, ending at the gas station and gunshop of the final showdown. Some stops are exact streets and trails; several were film sets, and the Kawkawa Bridge has been demolished.
Poldark's Cornwall is real Cornwall: the 2015 adaptation filmed Nampara, Wheal Leisure and Truro at St Agnes Head, Botallack and Charlestown, with Trenwith played by Chavenage House near Tetbury.
This route follows eight locations from the 2015 adaptation, from the cliffs above St Agnes and the engine houses of Botallack to the beaches of the Lizard and the north coast. Most are open to the public, but they are working landscapes and nature reserves as much as film sets, so expect footpaths, tides and weather.
Saturday Night Fever was shot on location in Brooklyn: Tony Manero struts down 86th Street, buys pizza at Lenny's and works at a Bay Ridge hardware store.
The route follows Tony's week from the family house on 79th Street to the 2001 Odyssey disco floor, the rehearsal studio in Bensonhurst, the promenade bench under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and the bridge itself. The disco and Lenny's are gone, but the hardware store, the house, the studio and the bridge are still there.
Nicosia's walled old city is a five-kilometre ring of Venetian fortifications with three surviving gates — Famagusta, Kyrenia and Paphos. Inside are the Selimiye Mosque, the Bedesten, the caravanserai of Büyük Han and Ledra Street, the shopping street that became a symbol of the island's division. The walk crosses the Green Line on foot.
The route begins at Eleftheria Square, enters by Famagusta Gate and loops through the old city: the Selimiye and the Bedesten, Büyük Han, Kyrenia Gate, the Ledra Street crossing, the Ömeriye Mosque and Paphos Gate. The Selimiye, Bedesten, Büyük Han and Kyrenia Gate stand north of the Green Line; the rest are in the south.
Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai is set in Fujisawa and Kamakura on the Kanagawa coast, and its story runs through real places: the Fujisawa library where Sakuta first sees Mai in a bunny suit, the Enoden line to Shichirigahama, the beach where he meets Shoko, the shrine on Enoshima and the aquarium on Katase Beach.
The route follows the first television series from the library and Fujisawa Station to Goshogaya Park, Shichirigahama and Enoshima. Mai, Tomoe and Shoko each have a scene here, and most of the stops are ordinary public places that still look much as they do in the anime.
Halloween's Haddonfield is South Pasadena and Hollywood, from the Myers house on Mission Street to the Doyle house on Orange Grove Avenue. John Carpenter shot the 1978 film in 20 days that May, using a quiet Los Angeles suburb, a Sierra Madre cemetery and two houses on a Hollywood block with few palm trees to stand in for Illinois.
This route follows Michael Myers from the 1963 murder in his childhood home to the stolen mask at Nichol's Hardware, the school day, the first sighting at the hedge and the babysitting night in Hollywood. The Myers house has moved since filming; the route says where it stands now.
The Walking Dead was filmed across Georgia, with downtown Atlanta, Bellwood Quarry, the Cobb Energy Centre and Senoia standing in for its apocalyptic sets.
This route follows the show from Rick's first ride into Atlanta, through the survivors' camp at the quarry and the CDC, then south to the town that became Woodbury and to Rick's home town, and on to Alexandria and the Kingdom. Most of the stops are on public streets or in public parks; the two studio-lot stops sit on private land.
The Declaration of Independence was debated, written and adopted in a few streets of Old City Philadelphia: City Tavern, Carpenters' Hall, Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell are all within a short walk.
The route runs from the tavern meeting of May 1774 and the First Continental Congress, through Jefferson's drafting in June 1776, to the vote of 2 July, the adoption on 4 July and the public reading on 8 July. The Liberty Bell's famous ringing is more legend than record.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day was shot across Los Angeles and beyond in 1990 and 1991: the Sixth Street Bridge, the Santa Monica Place mall, the Bull Creek spillway and the Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana all appear in the film.
This route follows nine of those real places in story order, from the biker bar where the T-800 picks up its clothes to the steel mill where it dies. Some have vanished — the Sixth Street Viaduct was demolished and the Corral Bar is now a library — and one is in Fremont, not Los Angeles at all.
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.
In September 1978, an 18-year-old photographer named Reza Shirazi comes home to Tehran and is pulled into the last days before Black Friday. The developers built the game from interviews with forty Iranians who lived through the revolution and from photographs by Michel Setboun; the streets, the cinema hideout and the prison are real places, filled with a fictional cast.
This route follows the game's 1978 story in order, from a Hasanabad rooftop to the shooting at Jaleh Square, then ends in the Evin Prison interrogation that frames the whole game. It is a route through the city the game recreates, not a walking itinerary.
In the spring of 1989, Henry leaves Boulder for a summer job as a fire lookout in Wyoming's Shoshone National Forest. His only company is Delilah, the voice on the other end of a walkie-talkie, until fireworks at a lake, a ransacked tower and a fenced research camp turn the job into a mystery.
The route follows the game's places and the real Wyoming behind them: the bar where Henry meets Julia, the Cody rodeo the characters talk about, the Shoshone forest still marked by the 1988 Yellowstone fires, and stand-ins for the fictional Two Forks tower, Jonesy Lake, Wapiti Station, Cave 452 and Thorofare Lookout.
