197 PICTURE PERFECT...

I stumbled across a website that creates cracking, print-ready map posters of any location in the world - handy if, say, you were doing a trip across Europe in a couple of months and wanted to create a poster commemorating the trip...

It runs entirely in a browser and is powered by OpenStreetMap data, allowing me to search for any city and create my own detailed map with as much detail as I want, then pick from dozens of curated themes or build my own custom colour palette.

After an hour of work, I created this image, which looks good. I decided to apply the darker colours for the cities we are visiting on the official rally, the lighter ones for our trip home.

I knew Freiburg, nestled in the Black Forest, was going to have a green theme. Menaggio, on the shores of Lake Como, was getting a blue treatment.

After that, I saw a theme with gold accents, which I thought fit Monaco pretty well. Then I used the colours of the Belgium national football team for Namur.

I thought I'd add a bit of contrast to the image by creating the places we are visiting on the way home in lighter themes.

I used football as a guide for San Sebastián (Real Sociedad play in blue and white stripes) and Bilbao (their team play in red and white stripes) too. For Nice and Séte, well, I just liked the theme to be honest!

After a bit of messing around in my image manipulation software, I ended up with a nice collage of the images. Originally, they were horizontal, but the cities were cut too much, so I whizzed them into vertical images, and it looked much more effective.

This adds absolutely nothing to the trip, but I'm sitting twiddling my thumbs; if I don't do something creative, I'll end up buying something! I've already gone down a rabbit hole with trabs, sunglasses and watches, what next, Martini Racing socks? Ooooh, let me just fire up Google...