We Went to See Our Map in France

From the moment we received our invitation in September, we have been asking for your help to enable us to visit our map at the Nous, les Fleuves exhibition at the Musée des Confluences in France. Although we didn't reach our original Ko-fi goal, we raised much more money than we expected. It was our first time seeing our work displayed in an exhibition, even though Robert has been creating maps for six years and has already licensed them for several museums around the world. This map was also one of the biggest Grasshopper Geography maps ever printed, measuring 4.5 metres in height and around 6 metres in width. Crazy!

We are forever grateful to everyone who donated and to our family and friends who helped us. Special thanks go to Richard, who phoned us a few days before the exhibition launch to offer a larger donation, saying that he “really wanted us to be there, whatever the price”. Furthermore, Robert’s father was kind enough to lend us his camper van with a full tank of fuel, and his mother helped us prepare, ensuring that we had everything we needed and left on time.

As you may know, we don’t own a car and try to live as sustainably as possible. However, with limited time and a tight budget, a small camper van was the best option for us. This way, we could cut back on accommodation and food costs, and we also had the freedom to visit some potential business partners along our route, which will hopefully be very beneficial for our small business. Both meetings went really well; we met some amazing people and discussed everything that we had never managed to cover in emails. We will tell you all about them as soon as they are official, but for now, we don't want to push our luck.

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

This trip was the best thing to happen to us this year. We had a great time, the map looked stunning, and we are hopeful that our meetings will be fruitful, too.

In an attempt to balance out all the help we received, we gave away some prints - everyone who donated received at least one entry into the draw to win a map. We announced four winners and have already sent three maps to three different parts of the world.

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

Read more about the exhibition in our article We, the Rivers Exhibition in Lyon