Maps tell our story
Julie and I are old school when it came to plotting our course across five continents during our Follow the Sun journey. We used a combination of fold-out maps, map books, guide books and the occasional reference from Mr. Google to plan each of our 755 days on the road. To supplement all that at a micro level, we often used our GPS – which we named Karen – to guide us hour by hour some days. Karen often sent us astray, down a road too small for Tramp or one dissipating to nothingness or just incomprehensively wrong. That’s life on the road.
Looking at the big picture, I have drawn – not specifically tracked – all legs of our journey onto one map which gives an overall helicopter (or space ship) view of our journey. There are over 200 blog posts documenting Follow the Sun across 70 countries but these lines on the maps tell the story a different way.
The last leg of our journey, more like two legs if you get pedantic, saw us crossing Europe and Türkiye before exploring the Caucasus countries and returning to Belgium where we shipped Tramp to the US for the home stretch run to California. It was an emotional return after having started our journey six and a half years ago with no idea what laid ahead for us.
Here’s how that run to the Caucasus and back again looked like on a map. If you want to drill down to see the detail you can click here.
When we picked up Tramp in Baltimore Maryland our mission was to drive across the northern stretches of the US before finally arriving home in California. That journey looked like this and if you want to have a closer look at the detail you can click here.
To continue the map-a-mania theme, if you’d like to drill down for a detailed look of our travels you can click at will on North America in 2017, Central and South America in 2018, Europe and Africa in 2019.
Maps are great fun to track one’s travel and to help look back on all those memories. We’ve got a bucket load of those memories and can’t wait to add to it in the months to come.
Lines on the map don’t do it justice, but it certainly puts a huge perspective to your story. I have loved every minute of it, even if I could never have the nerve to go to so many of the beautiful places you have visited.
When will you get around to the travel journal, available in all good book stores…I will be the first to purchase ❤️🌏❤️🌎❤️🌍
Thank you Anne, that is very kind. We took it one day at a time and 755 days later we finished. Just like that!! Bill