Where these numbers come from, and where they are weak
⚠️ The temperatures run cold, deliberately. Every figure comes
from ERA5 reanalysis — a model on a ~9 km grid. Where that grid meets a coastline
it blends ocean cells into the land, and reanalysis has been measured understating a
coastal town's average high by about 8 °F on exactly this kind of shore. Good for
ranking places against one another; not for deciding what to pack.
Weather
Ten calendar years, 2015–2024, of daily modelled maximum, minimum and precipitation,
averaged by month and queried at each destination's real elevation. The low is the
dawn minimum, around 6–7am. Climatology is not a forecast.
Water temperature — measured
Sea-surface temperature, ten-year monthly means from the same reanalysis family as
the air figures. It is the surface: what you feel swimming, not what a diver
meets below a thermocline. Inland water is not measured. The marine archive
covers oceans, so lakes, rivers, springs and swamps show “—” and
are left out whenever a water minimum is set. Nothing here is estimated from the air
temperature — water lags air by weeks, and a guess would read exactly like a
reading.
Distance
Air times are estimates built from great-circle distance, assumed connections and a
final transfer leg — no airline schedule was consulted. Road times are
estimates from Oakland. Use them to sort, not to book.
Photographs
From Wikimedia via its API, hotlinked at source with photographer and licence on each
image. No URL was composed; every one was returned by the API, and each file
was checked against its own Commons categories to strip charts, maps, coats of arms,
postcards, archive scans and disaster coverage. Not individually inspected, so a loose
match remains possible.
Queer travel
Some tags are underlined. Those rest on a page somebody else published —
a MICHELIN entry, a UNESCO inscription, a GayCities guide, a national park
authority — and clicking one opens it. A tag without an underline is our own
judgement and nothing more. Most tags have no underline yet: the sourcing has
been done for five destinations so far, not for all of them.
The 🏳️🌈 score rates how established a place is as an LGBTQ+ destination — editorial,
like every other vibe score. Separately and not editorial: where a destination
sits in a country that criminalises same-sex sexual activity, its card says so, from
the Human Dignity Trust, checked 24 September 2026. A
country's absence from that list is not a statement that it is welcoming.
Sourced or reasoned
Ocean map: Esri World Ocean — Esri, Garmin, GEBCO, NOAA NGDC, and other contributors.
Satellite: Esri World Imagery — Esri, Vantor, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS
User Community; place labels © OpenStreetMap contributors, HERE and Garmin.
Photographs © their creators via Wikimedia. Built