Jamestown to Yorktown is the best-known stretch of Virginia's early American history: from the 1607 James Fort at Historic Jamestowne, via the Capitol in Williamsburg and St. John's Church in Richmond, to the Moore House and surrender field at Yorktown.
The route follows 174 years from England's first lasting colony to Cornwallis's surrender in 1781, with Patrick Henry's speeches along the way. Most stops can be visited; the Williamsburg Capitol is a reconstruction.
Fallout 76 is set in West Virginia, and its map reproduces Flatwoods, Point Pleasant, Charleston's Capitol, The Greenbrier and the New River Gorge Bridge.
This route follows the landmarks in the order the main quest reaches them, from the Responders' church at Flatwoods and the airport at Morgantown to the Free States' armory at Harpers Ferry, the Brotherhood's asylum at Weston and the Enclave bunker beneath the Greenbrier. Each stop pairs the real site with what the game does there.
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 Mayflower's 1620 voyage runs from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire and Leiden in the Netherlands through Southampton, Dartmouth and Plymouth, England, to Provincetown and Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts.
The Pilgrims were English Separatists who left home for the Netherlands, then sailed for America in two ships. One, the Speedwell, kept leaking, so they crowded onto the Mayflower alone and finally sailed from Plymouth in September 1620, bound for Virginia.
This route follows them stop by stop, from the manor where their church met to the rock tradition names as their landing place. Plymouth Rock is a tradition, not a documented spot, and the stop says so.
Dexter is set in Miami, but only part of it was filmed there: Ocean Drive in South Beach and the waters off Virginia Key are real Miami, while Long Beach, California, plays much of the rest.
The route follows the Showtime series from the pilot's Miami street scenes to Long Beach's Villa Riviera and university campus, and ends at Ontario International Airport for the finale.
Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds is set in Brooklyn, New Jersey and Boston, but it was filmed in Newark, Bayonne, Athens on the Hudson, Lexington, Virginia, and Naugatuck, Connecticut. Ray Ferrier tries to get his children to their mother as alien tripods rise around them.
The route follows the film's flight in story order and shows where each scene was actually shot, from the first tripod to the final reunion. Several stops are film stand-ins, so pins mark towns rather than exact addresses.
The Exorcist is set in Georgetown, Washington DC, and opens in the ruins of Hatra in northern Iraq. The real Exorcist Steps, Healy Hall and Lauinger Library are on the Georgetown campus, and a hospital on Roosevelt Island stood in for a Washington scene.
The route follows the film from Merrin's dig at Hatra to the MacNeil house and the stairs where Father Karras falls.
The Silence of the Lambs is set in Virginia, Baltimore and Memphis but was filmed largely in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the FBI Academy at Quantico, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall as real stops.
This route follows Clarice Starling from her FBI training to Lecter's cell and the hunt for Buffalo Bill. Two sites are private or gone, so the map marks them with a caveat.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was filmed on Lambeth Bridge and Stoney Street in London, the Glenfinnan Viaduct and Glen Coe in Scotland, Virginia Water in Surrey and the Divinity School in Oxford.
The third film was the first to use real locations extensively, so this route follows the story in film order, from the Knight Bus in London to the Dementors on the Highland train and the hospital wing in Oxford. Several lakes stood in for the Black Lake, so some pins are approximate.
The Battle of Iwo Jima was fought in February and March 1945 on a small volcanic island in Japan's Ogasawara group, from the black-sand landing beaches to the summit of Mount Suribachi. Its famous flag-raising photograph became the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
This route follows the battle from the landing on 19 February, through the Suribachi flag-raising and the fight for the northern gorge, to the memorial in Arlington and the 1985 Reunion of Honor, where veterans of both sides met on the same beach. Iwo Jima itself is not open to ordinary visitors.
The X-Files is set in Oregon, Alaska, Washington State and Pennsylvania, but it was filmed around Vancouver: in Queen Elizabeth Park, at Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam, at Delta Air Park and in Chinatown. The show remained in Vancouver for its first five seasons, and its 2008 film returned to British Columbia.
The route follows seven episodes and a film, from the pilot in 1993 to I Want to Believe in 2008, and pairs each scene with the British Columbia place that played it. Some scenes were shot in a specific building or clearing the sources do not name, so those pins are approximate.
Dirty Dancing is set at a fictional Catskills resort but was filmed at Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia and around Lake Lure, North Carolina. In the summer of 1963, Baby Houseman falls for dance instructor Johnny Castle and takes his partner's place at a nearby resort.
This route follows the film from the Houseman family's arrival to the final lift, through the places that stood in for Kellerman's and the Catskills resort often cited as its model: the lodge and lake at Mountain Lake, the old boys' camp and golf green at Lake Lure, and Grossinger's in New York.
inFAMOUS 2 builds New Marais from real New Orleans: the French Quarter, Bayou St. John, Oak Alley, Fort Jackson and the Lower Ninth Ward. Cole MacGrath flees ruined Empire City to a Louisiana city ruled by the demagogue Joseph Bertrand and needs a scientist, a device and power cores to beat the Beast.
New Marais is Sucker Punch's New Orleans: a fictional city assembled from the French Quarter, above-ground cemeteries, plantation houses, a Civil War fort, the bayous and the flooded districts left by a hurricane. This route follows Cole's story through seven of those stand-ins, from the swamp where he lands to the cathedral tower where the game ends.
On the night of 14 April 1865 John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington and escaped on horseback. Lincoln died the next morning in a house across the street; Booth was hunted down twelve days later in a Virginia barn, in what was then the largest manhunt in US history.
The route follows both threads in turn: the theater and the room where Lincoln died, then Booth's road south through the Navy Yard Bridge, a Maryland tavern, a doctor's farmhouse and a swamp, to the farm where it ended.
Mrs Dalloway unfolds in one June day across Westminster, St James's Park, Piccadilly's Hatchards bookshop and Regent's Park. Big Ben marks the hours for Clarissa, preparing her party, and for Septimus, a war veteran; the two never meet.
This route follows the characters through the London they walk, almost all of it still standing. The Dalloways' house, the florist and the doctors are fictional.
In 1961 the Freedom Riders took two buses from Washington, D.C. through Rock Hill, Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, to test the Supreme Court's ruling against segregated bus terminals. In Alabama a mob burned a bus while police looked away; hundreds more riders ended up in Mississippi's jails and Parchman Farm.
The route follows the rides through the places where it happened, several of them now museums and part of a National Monument.
Into the Wild tells the true story of Christopher McCandless: he graduated from Emory University in Atlanta in 1990, paddled the Colorado River into Mexico, worked in Carthage, South Dakota, and in April 1992 walked onto the Stampede Trail outside Healy, Alaska. He died in an abandoned bus that August, aged 24. Jon Krakauer wrote the book in 1996; Sean Penn filmed it in 2007.
The route follows his documented trail. The Stampede Trail is dangerous, and this route is not an invitation to retrace the last part of it.
