Albania-Macedonia, east of Dirac

 And... this is the last truly chaotic map I have to do of the Balkans. I'm so glad. There's still parts of Croatia and Slovenia to do to finish with the Balkans altogether, but this, this above... this horror show is finished. Yay.

I don't think the choice to do these larger sections is necessarily faster... I think it's more that when I get my teeth into a particular process, I'm less likely to put it down. One thing I find with a series of small jobs, when each in the string are finished, it's easier for me to throw off the next one for an hour, a day or even ten months. Whereas, something big like this... I'm not completely relaxed until it's done.

Anyway, I spent about 3.5 hours tidying this up today. and I think probably about 5 on it yesterday... which sounds like a lot. But when I think about the eight hour shifts I've worked in my life that have ended without anything real to show from it — and I know all of you know exactly what I mean — this really feels like time well spent.

So, this wraps up the Rumelia sheet for now, which the reader can compare with this from Aug 8, six days ago:

And it tidies up the Illyria sheet:

On Google Earth, we can see what's been finished overall in this corner of the globe:

Keeping in mind that everything in the upper right corner behind the red boxes has been mapped. It can be seen that I've worked a line north up to Sarajevo, then jumped way west through Croatia, which has steadily widened with each trip around the map that I've done. So I'm going to even that up now, pushing way into south Italy, then north, evening up that scraggling line. It's an opportunity to map a very different country (though Italy is going to be very densely infrastructured, all type-1 hexes) and a lot of coast. All of Italy is smaller than Romania and Serbia put together, but it's very long so finishing it will cover a lot of open sea, with Sicily and Sardinia being the last areas finished.

So, it's across the water with my next map, with the densest part of Apulia on the block.