With only one week left, we are frantically building up our Alleykat World Trip Maps! We currently have no particular route or plan, other than a few key targets to hit along the way. The first: to be in Turkey by 2013.
The world trip maps were made to locate points of interest in countries we’re thinking of cycling through. Yes… this simple map… this simple geographical information… it will somewhat dictate where our wheels will turn over the next few years! These maps make it much easier to determine distances and gain a spacial awareness of where key attractions lie.
So far we’ve been creating our points of interest through information from travel books, friends, family, bike touring websites and more. The latest information resource we’d like to share with you is Atlas Obscura!
Atlas Obscura
From the words of Atlas Obscura himself (or herself), the site is a guide book to “the world’s most wondrous places”.
“User-generated and editor curated, the Atlas is a collaborative compendium of amazing places that aren’t found in your average guidebook.
If you’re looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you’ll find them.”
Finding Destinations
We were essentially able to sort, by country, through regions we have planned to see. Some countries only have a few destinations, others have many. Germany had a lot of points of interest relating to disused electrical infrastructure; an Obscura member clearly has some kind of weird fetish. Many of the places of interest were not actually interesting to us, but hidden in the thousands of entries were quite a few bits of gold. Defs worth digging for.
Most entries have a Google map associated with them, which made it easy enough for us to plot our data points. We were then able to load everything up for you to see!
Give it a go!
Open up Atlas Obscura and check out its goods. You might even learn something you’ve never known about the very town or city that you live in…
