There may be many paths along the remote, windswept Faroe Islands that Google’s street view vehicles can’t traverse, but that’s where the archipelago’s many four-legged residents come in. Last year, the Danish territory petitioned Google to bring its Street View feature to its shores. They felt a little left out, considering that Street View has even captured places like the Galapagos Islands and the Great Barrier Reef. Some residents of the 18-island chain decided to take matters into their own hands, proving not only that their homeland was worth documenting, but that they had simple solutions to some of the technicalities.

Resident Durita Dahl Andreassen of Visit Faroe Islands gave an impassioned plea, saying “To me it is the strangest thing that I cannot show my friends in other countries where I am from. My home country is beautiful, green and kind of undiscovered to the rest of the world – and I want to share it with the world. If Google Street View will not come to the Faroe Islands, I will make The Faroe Islands visible to the world in another way.”

Andreassen spearheaded a campaign called Sheep View 360, outfitting five of her own sheep with solar-powered cameras attached to special harnesses and letting them roam all over the hillsides as they normally would. Unsurprisingly, the sheep captured some spectacular footage, wandering up onto the island’s many grassy rooftops as well. The photos were sent directly to Andreassen’s smartphone.

The campaign worked. Google supplied islanders with camera equipment to capture the Faroe Islands on foot, in cars, from kayaks, ships, bikes and wheelbarrows. Check it out here (in some shots, you can even pan down to see the sheep!)

“Where there’s a wool, there’s a way,” commented David Castro Gonzalez de Vega, Google Maps program manager.

Mons, Belgium might just be the most interesting and artistic-looking city on the entirety of Google Street View, full of seemingly spontaneous dramatic scenes like chaotic clouds of floating white feathers, painters turning sidewalk crossings neon pink, and basketballs falling out of trees like fruit. The theatrical performances are timed to coincide with the arrival of Google’s camera-equipped van when it comes along to map out the area.

Mons Street Review, spearheaded by artists Ludovic Nobileau and Antonia Taddei, is an initiative put on by the city as part of its agenda as a European culture capital. The scenes are curated by citizens, who transform the streets into urban theater sets and pose as the camera passes.

The artists encouraged people to come up with their own ideas, create their own roles and costumes, and arrange props however they like. About 900 people participated on 42 streets, essentially hijacking Google’s service to promote themselves and their city.

The aim is to present Mons the way the people see it, as a living place of culture and history rather than a series of static street view images. Says Nobileau, “It should be up to people, rather than Google, to represent cities.”

The dark architectural equivalent of ‘Faces of Meth,’ these compiled Google Street View images of Detroit from 2009 through 2013 paint a poignant portrait of decay in the city. Entitled ‘GooBing Detroit,‘ a tumblr blog uses Google Street View Time Machine to follow the fast transformation of houses from cute and cheerful suburban residences to overgrown vacant lots.

Much has been said about the decline of a once-great city, and the seemingly diminishing chances of a comeback. The city’s 78,000+ ‘feral houses‘ are the stuff of legend, seeming to revert back to a wild state the way domesticated animals tend to do when left to their own devices.

The Street View images are often astonishing in the rapid transition in a span of just a few short years. A stretch of houses may have cars parked in the driveways, toys on the lawn and other signs of life all around in the first image, while by the third or fourth they’re barely discernible among the overgrowth.

While these images really drive home how much Detroit has lost over the last three decades, many residents aren’t ready to give up hope, despite the fact that the city’s population has declined from a peak of 1.8 million to just 700,000. There are indeed areas of the city that still thrive, but the question of an overall plan (either to break the city into manageable pieces or reinvigorate it as a whole) remains an open one.

London may have changed just a tiny bit since the 17th century, but you’d hardly know it looking at some of these mash-ups of classic paintings superimposed against modern scenery snapped by Google.

Londoner ‘Shystone‘ created a series of images matching up famous paintings of locations around the city with Google Street View images, with various elements of the two occasionally blending together.

The paintings often appear to be actual three-dimensional objects in the photos – oversized canvases blocking the roads or propped against light poles. Vans seem to come precariously close to smashing through the canvas in some shots. Modern tourists look out onto the Thames River as it was in 1746.

In one case, a long-demolished building is temporarily resurrected; a three-story townhouse stood on the South end of Trafalgar Square from 1605 through 1874.

As a Londoner, Shystone offers up some interesting tidbits about the city’s history, including how the locations shown tie into classic literature like Vanity Fair or Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit.

Can you guess where in the world this unidentified Google Maps location is by landscape, road signs, architecture and cars? Test your geography skills with GeoGuessr, a site that drops you into a random Street View and challenges you to answer correctly five times in a row. Brilliantly simple, this virtual travel guessing game will stump you with featureless fields, and city scenes that seem to belong on entirely different continents.

Once placed in a location, you can move up and down the streets and use the arrows to view it in 360 degrees, just like on Google Maps and Google Earth. Sometimes, you might get lucky, and see some kind of identifying signs. Sometimes, there’s nothing but farmland and trees.

When you think you’ve determined the location, drop a pin on the world map on the right side of the screen and make your guess. You might be surprised how many times you’re about as off as you can possibly be. Some streets in Northern Canada look an awful lot like those in Argentina. Try it for yourself at GeoGuessr.com (via Laughing Squid).