Comment by lastofthemojito

My aunt and uncle were disembarked from a cruise ship because they were ill (covid) and they were taken to hospital. They phoned my mum to tell her of the situation while still disoriented and said they were in Spain.

The Canary Islands are Spanish, but saying Spain in this situation wasn’t helpful when my mum was trying to book flights. Caused some mild confusion for a while.

So I just spent a few minutes playing with Great Circle Mapper and while it's not exactly definitive (you get a static image, no zooming) it appears that leaving from Greater London and heading in a great-circle direction toward the northeast coast of Brazil, there are indeed some combination of your location and precisely where you point the phone that you either pick up Finisterre, metropolitan France, or Brazil. I suppose if you kept going you would pick up France again as in the territory of French Guiana.

Going from, say, Land's End, it looked a bit more likely to nick northern Galicia.

> it might be worth adding awareness of things like overseas departments rather than just the parent country.

I'd guess showing the coordinates of the hit (and make it a link to maps) would be beneficial.

France is the country with the most surprising shape. Most of it is in Europe but the rest covers many timezones and several continents.