Two weeks driving south to north, from the Riviera coast to the Albanian Alps. Every place we ate, slept and loved, on one map.
Most travel guides are a document you read once. This is the trip, laid out so you can actually use it while you are standing at a hire car desk with the keys in your hand.
Base by base, where we slept, every restaurant and cafe, what we paid and what I would change.
36 spots pinned and colour coded, each with our notes and a photo. Filter to just the cafes, or just the food.
Tell it how long you have on the coast. It splits the nights across the towns the way we would, and marks the travel days.
Drag it about, cross things out, add whatever is nearby. Every travel time updates as you go.
Albania is not one city, and this is where most itineraries fall over. You do not just need to know what to do in Ksamil, you need to know how many nights to give it, what it costs you to get to the next place, and which morning disappears on the road. So you tell it how long you have on the coast and it lays the whole thing out, bases and travel days included.
Say whether you have a week or a fortnight and your days appear, town by town, in the order we did the coast ourselves. Every leg tells you how far it is to the next place and whether that is a walk or a drive, so you are not standing on the Riviera road with three tabs open trying to work out what is close.
The day you move towns says so in its own right, with our note on that drive, and if we never timed a leg ourselves it tells you that too rather than making a number up.
Nothing in there is fixed. Cross out the restaurant you do not fancy, drag a stop up or down by the little grip, or send it into a different day if you would rather have a lie in. The dashed plus sits right on the gap between two stops, so if you want something in the middle of your afternoon you just tap the middle of your afternoon.
Every travel time recalculates the moment you change something, and so does the total for the day, which means the plan on your screen is always the plan you are actually doing.
Tap that plus and it only offers you things that are actually close to where you already are, closest first, with the real travel time from the stop above it. Filter it down to food, or drink, or somewhere for after dark, and every single option is still a place from our two weeks here rather than whatever is paying to be top of a list.
One tap on share and the whole route lands in Messages, WhatsApp or your Notes, your edits and all, with a map link on every stop. No app to download, no account to make, nothing for your friends to sign up for.
Here are a handful of the pins, one from each town. The grey dots are the rest. The full map has all 36, each with our notes, a photo and a link to book it.
I've been travelling full time for the last 18 months, and every guide I make is a trip I actually took. Nothing in here is researched from a desk: if I name a restaurant, I sat in it, and if I link a place to stay, I would book it myself. After two weeks here it is honestly one of my favourite countries I have ever been to!
And the flip side of that: we never made it to Berat, Gjirokastër or Lake Ohrid, so none of it is in this guide. I am not going to write you a day I did not do.
51 countries and counting.
Ellen xStraight away. You land on your own page with the guide, the interactive map and the route builder, and the same link is emailed to you so you always have it.
No, and I want to be straight with you about it. We drove the coast south to north and then went into the Alps, and never got to either. It is the one real regret of the trip, and we will be back. Everything in this guide is somewhere we actually went.
Seven days buys you one half of the country properly, the coast or the Alps, not both. Fourteen is the one I would actually book, because that is the length at which you stop moving every second day. The builder does both, and it asks you which half first.
No. The blog covers whether Albania is worth it and roughly what it costs. The guide is the actual trip: the exact stays, the exact tables we sat at, the prices we paid, the map and the route builder.
No account needed. It opens in your browser like any web page, on your phone or laptop.
Email us within 30 days and we refund you, no questions asked, and you keep the guide. Full details on our refund page.
We update it as things change and you get every update free, forever. Two places we went have already closed since our trip, and they are marked as closed rather than quietly deleted.
We already did it, and got the nights wrong so you do not have to. Get the guide, the map and the route builder for less than one lunch in Himarë.
