On the topic of Shanks, I'm just curious as to where he and Mihawk met up to discuss Luffy's first bounty, and how he was able to be there.
As we saw in Impel Down/Marineford, the Marines and Cipher Pol seem to keep tabs on the locations of the Emperors as best they can. This makes sense, obviously they don't want any of them trying to drastically expand their territory, specifically conquering World Government affiliated islands. However, when we saw Shanks for the first time in the story's modern time, he was at an island seemingly extremely close to the beginning of the Grandline.
Now I say "seemingly" because I'm just going off of what we know. We know that Mihawk traveled to an island that Shanks and his crew were partying at to show him Luffy's first bounty. At most, this came a week or two after defeating Arlong. In that time, Mihawk had to travel from the Baratie's location to Shanks' location.
So it leaves two possibilities.
1- Mihawk is even more badass than we thought and sailed on his little boat through the Calm Belt and then some
Or
2-Mihawk -still a badass- took his little boat up Reverse Mountain, and came across Shanks decently close to the entrance to the Grandline.
If option two is the case, I'm curious as to both why Shanks was backtracked that much, and how he was able to be there without a full on Buster Call standing in his way.
We also know by Jaya that he was in relative distance to Whitebeard, which I assume took place in the New World.