"a 22,000-mile trek"

Travel On first seeing the headline "Paris or Bust: The Great New York-to-Paris Auto Race of 1908", I wondered how they coped with the massive expanse of water that is the Atlantic. Drive laps around a massive cruise ship? Aqualungs across the sea bed. Um, no, of course not:

"The proposed route would take the drivers across the United States, including through areas with very few paved roads, and then head north through Canada. Next came a left turn at Alaska, which the drivers had to cross in order to arrive at the Bering Strait, which separated the American wilderness from the Russian one. The race’s organizers started it in the middle of winter in the hope that the strait would be frozen. The course then led through Siberia, which no one had traveled by car, before heading into the final stretch: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris—overall, a 22,000-mile trek in an age when the horse was considered more reliable than the horseless carriage."

Let's hope Charley Boorman doesn't see this.