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Route 66 Route Europe 2004

Route 66 Route Europe 2004

List Price: $79.99
Your Price: $72.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Quirky but complete
Review: A fairly complete road atlas but with a few quirks. First, all the towns/locations are in the native language. For example, to use another review's complaints, instead of searching for Florence, you have to search for Firenze. Instead of Rome, use Roma. The second quirk is that the interface with my Belkin GPS was somewhat spotty. Sometimes it works, sometimes not and I have not been able to figure out why. All in all though, I was happy with it (have not found any better Europe road atlas databases out there yet).

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Utterly useless...
Review: Honestly if I hadn't spent the better part of eighty bucks on this thing, I'd be laughing. The search couldn't find the town in Italy I'm visiting. So I thought I'd widen the parameter and just put Florence (which it is near.) No luck--that just brought up a bunch of streets in the UK. So I tried Rome. Nope, can't find that. How about the country? Italy? No, that just brings up some hotels, etc.

So I tried to zoom in on the area the town is in and did manage to find it, though I still can't find Florence (despite knowing exactly where it is geographically.)

I am not a computer map neophyte here. I've been using MS Autoroute for years, but it won't run on my PowerBook. I bought this thinking 'how bad can it be?' The answer: Worse than I could have ever imagined--and I'm a pretty cynical guy.

Buy a paper map or get Virtual PC and run the MS stuff. Honestly, this is bad enough that I feel ripped off. (...)

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Utterly useless...
Review: Honestly if I hadn't spent the better part of eighty bucks on this thing, I'd be laughing. The search couldn't find the town in Italy I'm visiting. So I thought I'd widen the parameter and just put Florence (which it is near.) No luck--that just brought up a bunch of streets in the UK. So I tried Rome. Nope, can't find that. How about the country? Italy? No, that just brings up some hotels, etc.

So I tried to zoom in on the area the town is in and did manage to find it, though I still can't find Florence (despite knowing exactly where it is geographically.)

I am not a computer map neophyte here. I've been using MS Autoroute for years, but it won't run on my PowerBook. I bought this thinking 'how bad can it be?' The answer: Worse than I could have ever imagined--and I'm a pretty cynical guy.

Buy a paper map or get Virtual PC and run the MS stuff. Honestly, this is bad enough that I feel ripped off. (...)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great software with logical user interface
Review: I bought this just prior to a trip to Germany and the Netherlands.
We installed it and used it successfully with a Microsoft GPS receiver without even referring to any of the documentation, a testament to simplicity.
Keep in mind you need TWO people in the car to use this safely unless you're going to pull over regularly, and this is hard to do on many European highways.
It was extremely useful because many streets in Amsterdam either didn't have street signs or the sign didn't match our printed map. Also, for whatever reason, signs in Germany and the Netherlands for major highways tell you what cities each direction leads to, but not the direction (East, West, etc.) so if you didn't know the names of some nearby towns, you couldn't tell which direction to take. Watching the arrow on the GPS allowed us to determine, in most cases, which way to go (in some cases, they'd have 2-3 ramps and they'd reverse direction which made it hard to tell if you couldn't see the ramp).
A few caveats: we couldn't find out hotel in a search because Route 66 spelled it wrong. When we ran a search by the town's name, we found the hotel in a list.
Also, when we reached the Dutch Resistance Museum, it turned out it had moved. In Route 66's defense, we were told that even recent Dutch maps don't show the new location.
This program is excellent and I recommend it highly. Now if I could just configure Microsoft's OWN GPS unit to work with their Streets and Trips (which wasn't a problem with Route 66), I could use the GPS in the U.S., but NATURALLY Microsoft can't make trouble free software.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent software and easy to use.
Review: Was easy to use. Good search capability. For example, I just typed in the name of the route start and the hotel name where I wanted to go, it found them and mapped the route. It even found the location of carpools in Delft by just typing the two words. It is a very good software and the graphics look good too, better than the pictures posted on the software manufacturers website.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: It Really Works Well!
Review: We just returned from 3 weeks in Europe relying on Route 66 to get everywhere. It's GREAT! I almost didn't purchase the program based on the first negative reviewer. But his problem was that he wanted names in American rather than the native language (and the road signs are in the native language!). (And if he really tried, he could have found his destination by clicking down by country and region.) It was difficult adapting my Delorme GPS to work, but with the help of Customer Service from Route 66, I did and then everything worked superbly all the way. Very easy, intuitive interfaces. More information produced than you'll ever need. What blew everyone away was that we were driving and someone wanted a rest stop. Two clicks and all rest stops were displayed, with one in five miles. Similarly, we found a marvelous lakeside restaurant 4 miles off an autobahn to stop for lunch rather than relying on highway service food. All in all an invaluable purchase!


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