A standing atlas of 522 places, kept for a Nanjing doorstep. Each one carries a twelve-month curve, an honest door-to-door time and a comfort ceiling — so the list quietly rearranges itself as the year turns. Anywhere genuinely shut is taken out rather than marked down. Pick a month below and see what it says.
The five strongest answers for every month, scored with your current settings. This is the view to open when the question is when rather than where.
Every number here is an editorial judgement, not a measurement. What follows is exactly how the ranking is produced, so you can disagree with it precisely.
closed → excluded, otherwise
score = (season ÷ 10) × (40 + interest × 6) × days-fit − time − comfort − friction
| Term | What it does |
|---|---|
| Closure gate | A season score of 0 means the reason to go is physically absent — the road is shut, the lavender is cut, the ice festival is demolished, no ship sails. Those destinations are removed from the ranking entirely for that month. They cannot be compensated for by being interesting. |
| Season | 0–10 for the selected month, worth up to 50 points. |
| Interest | Scenery / culture / history / water / food, each 0–10, weighted by your sliders, worth up to 50 points. Defaults follow your stated ranking. |
| Time | Door-to-door hours from central Nanjing beyond a 3-hour floor, at 1.25 points an hour, plus 3 per connection. A 30-hour trip loses about 34 points — comparable to the entire season range, which is what "time is a primary constraint" has to mean. |
| Comfort | Each destination carries a comfort ceiling for cabin, lodging and service quality only: 10 is business-class reachable with real 5-star supply; 3 means guesthouses are the ceiling at any price. Deliberately not a measure of how rough the journey is — long drives are already counted as time, and you said driving itself costs you nothing. Worth up to 25 points against you. |
| Friction | Forced early starts and queue burden — the two things you named. Driving and physical effort are not penalised, so Patagonia and the Pamirs are not punished for being hard work. |
| Days fit | Below the minimum viable days a destination is excluded. Otherwise the
benefit is scaled by days ÷ ideal, so a trip that is one day short is barely touched
and one that is half the length it needs is halved. Penalties are applied after the scaling,
so a compressed trip no longer partially forgives its own travel time. |
Thirteen agents contributed, each writing a
validated module straight into a shared data/ directory — no records were copied
between them as prose, which is the only reason the atlas reached this size. The merge
(build.js) range-checks every one of the 12 monthly scores, the five interest scores and the
comfort ceiling, verifies the airport code and trip lengths, rejects a malformed record rather than
repairing it, and drops duplicate names across contributors — 27 of them on the final run, from 565
submitted down to 538 kept. A separate suite of 12 regression tests then runs against the built page,
including one that fails if the tests stop exercising the shipped scoring code.
Verified against sources rather than asserted: migration river-crossing windows, the Okavango flood mechanism, Antarctic and Patagonian operating seasons, the February Inca Trail closure, Iceland F-road dates, Norwegian and Alpine pass dates, US national park road dates, Harbin ice festival dates, Wuyuan bloom windows, the Similan and Sipadan closures, Kakadu's 2026 road works, and the NKG route network. Everything else is established climatology and tour-operations knowledge — high confidence on the windows, editorial on the exact scores. Re-check snow-dependent road and lodge openings at booking time; they move by 3–6 weeks a year.
| Okavango | The flood peaks in the dry season. Angolan rain takes four months to arrive, so July–August is high water; the local rainy season is when the delta is at its lowest. Six months apart. |
| Tanzania | Calving (February, Ndutu in the south) and the Mara River crossings (July–October, far north) are 800 km and six months apart. One trip cannot hold both. |
| Aurora vs midnight sun | Mutually exclusive. In June and July there is no astronomical darkness at all above the Arctic Circle — the aurora cannot be seen at any strength. |
| Peru in February | Not merely wet — the Inca Trail is legally closed for the entire month. |
| Chiang Mai in March | The instinct is to avoid the monsoon. Wrong instinct: burning season is worse. AQI 200–400, and the mountains are invisible. |
| Uyuni | The mirror needs the wet season. In the dry months it is a white crust, not a reflection. |
| Victoria Falls | Peak flood and Devil's Pool are mutually exclusive: April–May gives you the volume, October–November lets you swim the lip. |
This atlas has been through four adversarial audit passes, including one against the scoring engine itself. Every item below was a real defect found by an agent whose only instruction was to attack the work.
| Defect | Fix |
|---|---|
| Closed destinations could outrank open ones — the worst bug found. A season score of 0 simply contributed zero points, so an interesting closed place beat a dull open one. Kamikochi scored 27.5 in January while its road was physically shut; 40 such cases existed across the year. | Season 0 is now a hard exclusion, not a low score. |
| Comfort was absent from the formula despite being a stated primary constraint. | Every destination now carries a comfort ceiling, worth up to 25 points. |
| Time was underweighted — a 30-hour journey lost only 15 points against a 50-point season range, so modest interest differences outweighed an extra day in transit. | Reweighted to 1.25 points per hour; a 30-hour trip now loses about 34. |
| The days-fit multiplier scaled penalties too, so a compressed trip partially forgave its own travel time. | Fit now scales benefits only, and is graduated rather than a cliff. |
| Taroko Gorge was scored as open. | Still largely shut after the 2024 earthquake — Shakadang, Swallow Grotto, Nine Turns, Baiyang and Zhuilu are closed and Highway 8 is convoy-only. The entry is now Taipei and the north coast. |
| Lapland scored 5 for aurora in June and July. | Cut to 0–1: the midnight sun makes it physically unobservable. |
| Sipadan scored 4 in November. | Cut — the island closes to all diving for the entire month, every year. |
| NKG–Milan was listed as a live route. | Removed. The Neos service ended October 2025. This one could have stranded a booking. |
| Dubai, AlUla and Egypt scored 0–1 in high summer. | Raised. Nothing closes; it is brutally hot. A 0 is reserved for absence, not discomfort. |