Road atlases and navigating tips

I don't know if this will be really obvious to everyone else, but other places in the world (outside Australia) actually number the exits on their motorways. I mention this simply to make navigating in the car so much easier.

I have driven long distances across several countries and had Yvette navigating for me. We usually take with us the road atlases for the various regions we travel through. The brands we have used are:

• Philip's Multiscale Europe
• AA Big Road Atlas USA (and Canada & Mexico)
  
• Michelin Great Britain & Ireland Tourist & Motoring Atlas

Each of these are quite different to use, and have various benefits and drawbacks. With respect to motorway exits we found them numbered in the road atlases. There seem to be two numbering systems. The first (as used in Europe) is that exits are simply numbered in order from 1 at one end to whatever at the other end. The second numbering system (as used in Quebec) is that each freeway exit number is derived from the distance the exit is from the beginning.

Both numbering systems work well. And once you've worked them out they are brilliant for navigating purposes. The numbers are usually displayed on the large signs beside the motorway prior to each exit. I only mention all of this because if  you, like me, are totally unaware of such systems, then you will find it absolutely invaluable for getting around. Indeed, even the Google Maps driving directions use the exit numbers.

Yvette's sister tells of her experience in Germany:

When we were in Germany, we bought a map book of Germany in Australia before we left. Very helpfully in Germany every single turnoff from a major road is numbered, so we spent the night before we drove anywhere writing out the sequence of numbers we needed to take. Although we got lost once (because turnoff 35 JUST WASN'T THERE!) we used the map to get us back to the right place and back into our sequence of numbers.

Our experience was similar. In Quebec, once we worked out what all the numbers on the map actually meant (and how they corresponded to the directions) it meant that driving itself was much easier to manage. It did take us a few hours to figure it out, though - enough to miss a major turnoff and enter a city from a completely different direction.

The good and the bad of the various brands of road atlas...
(And while we're here, I'll just point out that different editions to ours might be slightly different.)

AA Good points:

• comprehensive coverage of each state of the USA and Canadian provinces
  
• the markings for 'scenic routes' were actually scenic! We drove Route 100 through Vermont and were not disappointed.

AA Bad points:

• huge format book - really much too large in size to take with you. If I could bear to rip a book (and I can't do it) I'd have taken out the relevant pages.
  
• the city and town maps are very scanty - you'll need extra ones for them.

Michelin Good points:

• manageable sized book
  
• distances in both miles and kilometres
• good city and town maps - much more useful than the AA ones

Michelin Bad points

• very cluttered maps
  
• sometimes it can be difficult to identify which distance measurements correspond to which roads - some of the numbers seem to 'float' ambiguously between a number of roads

Philip's Good points

• manageable sized book
  
• good introduction to each country in Europe
  
• very clear maps - less cluttered than the Michelin ones

Philip's Bad points

• city and town maps inadequate
• some of the marked scenic routes were NOT scenic, and some that were scenic were not marked as scenic in the road atlas

All had good motorway routes with exits marked clearly. Obviously, if you choose to travel on back roads there is less detail available in road atlases for those routes, but most of the main ones are marked, and usually with the national road number for the country it is in.

With a decent road atlas, and an understanding of how the motorway and road numbering systems work you should have less chance of getting lost. Despite all of our planning in this regard, we have been lost - but not often. Once in Ireland, trying to get around some roadworks that created a huge traffic jam, once in Quebec when we took the wrong exit and I had the wrong street address for the hotel, and once in Seville on approaching the city.

Actually, come to think of it, I'm going to have a whinge here. The road atlases show the big scale routes around a country, and often have city maps. What bugs me are the city maps - they infrequently show enough of the outskirts of a city to show where and how the motorways actually connect with the local streets. Once you leave the motorway and head into a town or city you can easily get lost until you can reorient yourself on the city maps. That happened to us especially in Seville, but it has happened before that too.

The pleasure is in the planning...

Travelling takes planning. Travelling with kids takes even more planning. I know some people will just cringe at the thought of meticulous planning - it does lack the sort of spontaneity that many travellers enjoy. But with kids, planning can avoid wasting huge amounts of time in queues, travelling between sights and other frustrations.

I love planning the holidays, almost as much as taking the holiday itself.

Here's (roughly) what I do.

1. We decide on a destination. Our current thinking is Greece and Turkey - whittled down from an epic journey through most of Eastern Europe.

2. Then we make a list of all the most worthwhile places to visit. As a guide, I use the UNESCO World Heritage List, and a couple of excellent books: 1001 Historic Sites You Must See Before You Die and 1001 Natural Wonders: You Must See Before You Die. We add to this anything of personal interest - for example, I have made a point of trying to see as many of Michelangelo's works as I can. I think I've only got four to go. We try to get a mix of natural and cultural places so that there's a good balance. We add to that any places that look interesting or unusual from our travel guides. The DK guides are great for this as they are pictorial as well as textual.

3. Get a map, and locate them all on the map.

4. To minimise travel, we find a centrally located cities and towns to form as a base. Sometimes, you just have to drive each day to get around the places you want to see. For example, we stayed in Seville as a base and travelled to Granada and Cordoba as day trips. It just saves repacking the luggage and hauling it around every day, and locating the new accommodation every day.

5. Join the dots. Link sights to their closest base town and estimate how many days will be required in each location, and how much time will be needed to travel between base towns.

6. We often do a lot of tweaking at this stage: trying to re-order the sequence in which we visit sights, or changing the route or direction of travel so that we spend the maximum time seeing the sights and less time on the road (or train / plane etc.)

7. Be prepared to leave something out if you just can't get it in. You will need to prioritise which sights are the "must see" ones, and which are a bonus.

8. Plan "vacant" days. You'll never know what you stumble across once actually travelling. In Quebec, we took an unplanned trip out to Parc Nationale de la Jacques Cartier and had a wonderfully relaxing day walking some of the trails and picnicking by the river.

9. Sometimes you're just going to have to drive (travel by train, etc.) to see those things you want to see. In our planning, we seem to have the uncanny knack of having "must see" sights which are located at the furthest extremities of our destination!

10. Map out the whole trip, including timing for travelling and every sight you want to see.

11. Check the opening hours, times and days for every sight. This is REALLY important so that you know you can actually get into a particular place on the day you are there. Sundays in Europe can be a bit tricky, and watch out for museums closed on Mondays (though some have different closed days).

12. Take into account what your children can cope with: jet lag at the beginning, general "down" time, sleeping, rest times and their walking limit.

13. Book ahead where possible. This limits time in queues - thus minimising fuss from the kids, and you get more time actually enjoying the sights. Where you cannot book ahead (such as the Eiffel Tower), plan to arrive before opening time. We had breakfast at the base of the Eiffel Tower and were first out of the lifts at the top. No fuss for us or the kids. Some useful "book ahead" ideas:

• City Passes (e.g. Paris Pass - www.paris-pass.com) if you're wanting to visit a lot of museums etc.
  
• Individual sights (we prebooked the Alhambra Palaces in Granada)
• Ferries, especially car ferries (we prebooked the Stranraer - Belfast and Wexford - Fishguard ferries)
• Tours which take in a number of places of interest to you
• Hotels / B&Bs / Accommodation if you have special requirements, such as cots, family rooms etc.
• Any shows you might want to see
• Trains which require reservations. We have no experience using Eurail, so I can't comment on that, but we took the New York to Albany Amtrak service and we needed to travel at a specific time so prebooked tickets reduced stress and hassle

14. Map your driving meticulously. I have successfully used Google Maps for driving in Spain and Portugal, and MapQuest for the UK, USA and Quebec. Google Maps was very reliable for driving directions, though it does take a bit of time to figure out the street numbers, names, and scale of distances on the ground. Have a print copy for ease of navigation, and use a tiny font size to keep the whole document as small as possible.

Our last trip to Paris, Spain and Portugal was planned in great detail before we left. Some people wouldn't be comfortable with this, but we found that it worked brilliantly. It reduced our stress over unexpected inconveniences, and made travelling with kids inherently enjoyable. The kids appreciate the element of predictability that planning gives. We felt confident in what we were doing because we didn't have to do any planning on the run.

wish list: digital travel guides

Our favourite travel guides are the Eyewitness Travel Guide series by Dorling Kindersley, probably because they're very visual, and so are we. The problem with these (and all other brands) is that they're so heavy. Who wants to lug around a whole heap (depending on how many countries you're going to) of heavy travel guides with them?

With the amazing uptake of netbooks over the past year or so (apparently about 1 in 10 laptop sales in Australia are now netbooks) when are DK going to release digital versions of their books so that they can be used on the computers or PDAs that people are taking travelling with them?

If they did release digital travel guides, it’s highly likely that we would end up buying both the paper version and the digital version. We'd use the paper one at home to browse through and use for armchair travel, and the digital one we would use on location.

On our last holiday we had just entered a new country with a different language and needed to find somewhere to buy some lunch. It was a Saturday afternoon in the country and it seemed like nowhere was open. We went to the tourist attraction that we planned to visit that afternoon, hoping that they might have a cafe (they didn't). Try as we might, we just didn't have enough of the language to communicate to the staff that we wanted to know where we could buy some lunch. We raced back to the car and started up the computer. We pulled up the file containing a scan of the phrasebook pages of one of our guidebooks. We were able to piece together enough words to communicate successfully what we were after.

Our computer saved the day, and it confirmed for us how useful digital guidebooks would be.

Other times, it would have been great to pull up detailed maps of where we were, or information about the place that we were visiting at that moment. Internet access isn't available everywhere, so having it all on tap would be great.

So DK, how about it? Eyewitness E-Travel?