We went to see our map in France

From the day we got our invitation in September, we were asking for your help so we can visit our map at the exhibition Nous, les Fleuves at the Musée des Confluences, in France. Although we never reached our original goal on Ko-fi, we raised a lot more money than we hoped to expect. This was the first time we saw our work displayed in an exhibition, even though Robert's been making them for six years and already licensed them for quite a few museums all over the world. This map was also one of the biggest Grasshopper Geography maps ever printed: 4.5 meters high and about 6 meters wide. Crazy!

We are forever grateful to everyone who donated, and also to our family and friends who helped us. A huge thanks to Richard especially, who'd phoned us a few days before the exhibition launch and offered to donate a bigger amount, because he “really wanted us to be there, whatever the price”. What’s more, Robert’s father was kind enough to lend us his camper van (with a full tank of fuel!) and his mother had helped us with the preparation, so we could be sure to have everything we need and leave on time.

As you may know, we don’t even own a car, and try to live as green as we can, but with that little time on our hands and that tight budget, a small camper van was our best option. This way we could cut back on the costs of accommodation and food, and we also had the freedom to visit some future partners along our route, that hopefully will be super beneficial for our small business. (Both meetings went great, we met amazing people and talked through everything that we had never managed to cover in emails. We’re going to tell you all about them as soon as they become official, but right now we don’t want to push our luck.)

Even though we traveled across half of Europe, proper sightseeing was out of the question. We visited only a handful of famous places along our route: the source of the Danube in Germany, the waterfall and the limestone cliffs at Baume-les-Messieurs in France,  and - with a small detour - Pisa and Ravenna in Italy.

This trip was the best thing that happened to us this year. We had a great time, the map looked gorgeous, and we are very hopeful that our meetings will be fruitful as well.

To try and balance out all the help we got, we gave away some prints - everyone who donated got at least one chance to win a map. We announced four winners, and already sent out three maps to three different parts of the world.

Thank you again for everything, seeing our map was really a great and humbling experience. We're going to post more pictures and short stories from our trip on our social media, so stay tuned if you'd like to see more!