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AAA Big Road Atlas Europe 2000 (Aaa Europe Road Atlas)

AAA Big Road Atlas Europe 2000 (Aaa Europe Road Atlas)

List Price: $19.95
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Find Something Else
Review: About the only thing this atlas is good for is to give you the geography of Europe -- you could do almost as well looking at a world globe. This atlas shows the major roads only, so it's good for only the most expediant travel from point A to point B. If you want to plan a casual vacation, you need to find maps with much greater detail. Of course, Michelin is the leader in this field. (Some people will find that Michelin shows TOO much detail.)

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Find Something Else
Review: About the only thing this atlas is good for is to give you the geography of Europe -- you could do almost as well looking at a world globe. This atlas shows the major roads only, so it's good for only the most expediant travel from point A to point B. If you want to plan a casual vacation, you need to find maps with much greater detail. Of course, Michelin is the leader in this field. (Some people will find that Michelin shows TOO much detail.)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Most usefull
Review: I bought this Atlas for my study-trip to Europe, and it was the most complete guide to get involved with the roads, the distances, and the geography of the countries I wanted to visit on weekends. If you are planning a road-trip to the old world this is your planning guide..

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: An adequate but hardly complete atlas
Review: Perhaps my problem would have been solved by a road atlas just of Western Europe. We were travelling primarily in three countries -- England, France, and Italy, and we found the atlas generally helpful for the long-haul trips, but pretty much worthless for the inner city trips. We particularly appreciated how the different map sections overlapped a bit.

Here are some more specific observations:

-This was clearly not designed for English-speaking people; it's got a more multi-lingual focus. That's fine, except you have to know that Firenze=Florence and Baal=Basel. They should keep the native place names, but had this been designed for English-speakers they could have put the English names in parenthesis for the less "obvious" native-language city names.

-The so-called city maps are pretty worthless. The maps in our "Let's Go Europe!" guide were much more helpful, even though that isn't even an atlas. The city maps, seemingly included as an afterthought sandwiched in with the the index, didn't seem to contain any more roads than the main maps. This does a major disservice to travelers, who would have benefitted from even just a slightly larger & more detailed map for the major cities.

-The distance tables were also laughably incomplete. I mean, how many people REALLY drive from Paris to Warsaw? The distance table could have been GREATLY expanded without taking that much space. We were faced with, when trying to determine distances & make time estimates, to try to total the different mile segments in the map, but this is a pain. Including distance tables between, say Paris and Marseille, or Florence and Rome, seemed quite obvious but were nowhere. Rather than including one end-all be-all distance table, they should have included one on each of the country overview maps (which are quite helpful, except they have these cryptic road names -- E101 for the road, rather than A4, which is what it's actually called) indicating distances between major cities in that country and major cities in nearby countries, and there would even have been room for this.

-Some of the symbols are not explained in the legend. For instance, the legend doesn't explain what the "S" character, surrounded by a diamond, means. We surmised, after having driven on a section marked that, that it means a tunnel ("subterrainean" -- get it?)

-The toll roads, while supposedly indicated on the map, are too closely colored to non-toll roads to be easily distinguished, in my opinion. (A tip for travellers in France & Italy: pretty much ALL highways are tolls, and pricey at that -- we spent more than $100 on tolls b/t Paris & Rome, but thankfully they take credit cards at most toll stations & it's still cheaper than the trains). Guidance on the amount the tolls would cost would also have been helpful.

All in all, a decent atlas, but if you're planning ANY inner city travel -- even just to get to your hotel (and who isn't?), or needing guidance on how to time your visits & where to plan stopovers, then this is NOT your complete guide to motoring on the Continent.


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