You can follow my travels on this map. All squares I have visited already are highlighted in red. You can click on them and it will take you to the description and images of the visit. You can scroll in to enlarge the squares. Also if you scroll in you will see the grid that I use to define my quadrants.
Sometimes I might visit certain quadrants more than once. In this case I update the original post’s date and content and add whatever new insights I got. This is not visible on the map. It will still be the same marker with the same color.
Interactive Map
How to calculate the squares
The way our maps are designed is that you take something that is supposed to be a ball and try to stretch it to fit on a flat surface. If you ever did some handicraft work you will know that this is … difficult. There will be empty areas that you have to fill.
The way that most maps and the here used map provider openstreetmap are doing this is by filling those empty areas with “something” (the technique used is called Mercator projection). That is why on such maps Greenland looks bigger than Africa even though in reality it isn’t (Africa is in fact 14 times bigger than Greenland).
Obviously I don’t plan to visit Greenland or the North pole but this stretching already becomes very visible when you go to Norway. I couldn’t just take a snapshot of the map and put some straight lines on it. Up there in Norway it wouldn’t be the 25×25 km grid anymore but rather something like a 20×20 km grid.
Here the Internet is your friend. Some googling later and I found an insane formula (a lot of sine, cosine, etc.) that helped me to calculate the coordinates starting from one point and going 25 km west or east and 25 km north. From there it was just looping until I covered the parts on the map that I wanted to cover.
Is this all 100% accurately calculated? No, it isn’t. I did my best but I am neither a cartographer nor a mathematician so I had to cheat a little bit when lines started to overlap. But it is a lot closer to the “truth” than it would be just drawing lines with a ruler. And this is all what counts for me.
Is there a specific positioning of the squares?
No, there isn’t. I just started at some random point roughly in the middle of bottom of my map and looped my way to the left and to the right from this point and then continued the same way line by line upwards until I reached the top of Norway. I didn’t adjust the quadrants to perfectly match a city or a coastline.
What determines a square to be relevant for the map?
First of all I made the decision to travel through Europe, so the squares are covering that area.
Obviously I excluded all squares that would only encompass water. If I think I have a chance to visit something I put a square on it. That is why sometimes you might see a square with just a tiny little bit of coastline. As I didn’t adjust the squares to fit perfectly this might happen. I have a chance to visit this part of land, so it becomes a square on the map.
Sometimes there are small islands. I included most of them, just thinking that there might be a chance by boat.
Beyond that it was just my random decision which countries I would like to visit and which not. It became a mixture between geographical Europe and political Europe (European Union). I might change my mind in the future of which country is in and which isn’t. Who knows?
Why is the map not in English?
I am currently using openstreetmap as the so called tile provider for the map. With their help you can scroll in and out of the map. They dynamically provide tiles in the right resolution for free. Their standard map is a mixture of German and local labeling.
If this site accidently starts to make a lot of money or I win in a lottery (well, I potentially should start playing first) I might think about setting up my own tile server and create tiles with different labels. But right now I am very happy that openstreetmap allows me to use their server for free.
Was this really all you visited?
No, obviously I visited more sites during my life. But here I am including the ones that I have visited since I made the decision to go with this kind of map. I only pick those from the past that had a specific impact on me while being there. This is why you will see posts describing travels I made before starting the website.