Nozarashi kikô map

If you click on the image, it will get a bit bigger. But don't bother -- it's not very pretty. If I have time and the inclination I'll redo it, but for now, it's just something to help me understand the geography better.

I tried to work out for myself the route that Bashô took by making a map. Now, I'm not the world's greatest cartographer, so this is primitive. However, it was very useful to try to map the route because it was easy to see how 1) Nozarashi kikô is fictionalized, because the sequence of places doesn't make sense as a single round-trip journey and 2) some versions of the text list the places in a slightly different order. I'm not even sure if the routes reflect actual roads in all cases. Books that include maps (like the one on which this is based, Uwagawa Shôsuke's Nozarashi kiko no kaishaku to hyôron) give the routes of the actual journeys Bashô took which became the basis for the text, from what I can see.

So, is it safe to conclude that Nozarashi kikô is not really the record of a journey, but more like a collection of verses and prose contexts related to them, put together because the places were nearby each other? That in addition to collating a thank-you volume for the benefit of his patrons, Bashô found the "travel journal" format useful for creating a collection of verses that reflected his experiments with fûga (poetic elegance)?

So much has been written about Bashô and I've read so little of it. Nozarashi kikô gets considerably less attention than Oku no hosomichi (Narrow road to the interior), so perhaps it's a good place to start.