which driving map

Are you sure there's actually two different publications?

The red, spiral one has had slightly different names on the cover through the years, sometimes including tourist or touring, I think. But as far as I know, there's only one Europe version of their atlas every year and they all look about alike once you get inside.

The problem is that it's clunky and of a fairly large scale so it's hard to carry around and not much use except for planning or driving between fairly major points if you're going to zip all over the continent.

You'd be better off with their country maps or perhaps even the regional ones for specific areas. The exception to Michelin would be in Britain where the A-Z series is much better.

I don't know how many countries you'll be visiting so I don't know if an atlas or individual maps would better suit your needs. I have done a lot of driving in Europe and the last time I purchased a map was in 2005 because I dropped my GPS and broke it. If you have a smart phone or a tablet and a GPS, I don't believe you will have the need for any paper maps.

The problem with electronic navigation is that it only shows you a narrow strip along a path you have chosen - - it'll probably get you where you decided to go, but it won't show you the potentially neat stuff off to the side. It's pretty good as a moving map display, not much use as direction-giver.

I do a lot of wandering. I own several gps units with specialized applications. I take an automotive gps to Europe only when I'm traveling alone in areas with which I'm completely unfamiliar AND when I know I'll be doing a good bit of night driving or it's overcast and I want the compass function. Even then, it mostly stays in the trunk.

Although we love and swear by our GPS, which we take to Europe yearly, we always have details on paper for overviews and alternatives that may not agree with the GPS.

Atlas: we own the most detailed Michelin atlas for France. I make colored copies of the pages we'll need, but I think it's better to get detailed local maps which give an overview on one page.

Thanks to everyone for their replies. We will be travelling from Amsterdam to Bruges to Normandy to the French/Italian Riviera to Berner Oberland and Gimmelwald to Munich, Bavaria and the Rhine Valley before returning to Amsterdam. We have the GPS to help us find specific addresses, but thought it would be good to have a map(s) to plan the routes and see the big picture. We were leaning toward the atlas as it was just one thing and we thought it would be easier to handle in the car than the large foldout maps.

I would have thought that a simple European large format but few pages would have met those needs.

In the UK you can usually get one by the AA at clearance bookstores for around £2 to £5 the piece.

Anything more detailed I would have thought would have been overkill.

For something that simple you could use a map that comes in a National Geographic and watch the road signs. You'd have to fake the turn up to Gimmelwald somehow.

i usually buy more maps when I am there. Of course I bring them home as I've marked them up. :)

Pam

General maps will do if you're not traveling backroads.

The one advantage of the Michelin style map in the UK is that it differentiates high quality near motorway A class roads from the rest - so you can use them or avoid them according to preference.

The worst 'map' is Google as it does not use the UK road classification colours at all, and makes all roads below trunk A routes an indistinguishable white.

For covering the larger distances I think a national map for Germany and France will suffice. Both show parts of the surrounding countries, like the Michelin map (no.718 scale 1/750.000) of Germany the northern part of Switzerland and the eastern part of The Netherlands. France (no.721 scale 1/1.000.000) shows the southern part of Belgium and the western part of Switzerland and a bit of Italy. Michelin has also a cheap mini atlas (spiral back) of France with the same scale.

Driving from Amsterdam to Bruges (via Utrecht – Breda – Antwerp) is pretty straightforward as well further to Normandy (via Calais or Lille). The same for going back from Germany to Amsterdam as it is clearly signposted along the main roads. In Europe we use places (or roadnumbers) for orientation instead of directions like north or south.

For Switzerland you can decide on the spot if you still need a map, they are easy to get at gas stations everywhere. Or a larger tablet with Google Satellite instead of or in combination with Maps can be to my opinion a solution for the whole journey.

I prefer the Michelin maps for traveling a country. But with gasoline being so high in Europe, we travel from city to city via train. When the surrounding area is especially scenic, we'll rent a car and stay out in the countryside. We now try to minimize the area we're going to cover.

My last trip by car, I didn't even use maps. I'd go into MapQuest or GoogleMaps the night before and take notes on the route/itinerary we were taking. The road signs were easily followed. There again, we didn't put in any days more than a 100 miles or so. We had no problems getting around whatsoever.

With Michelin maps and a GPS, you'll do fine.

if you are a AAA member, you should be able to get international maps free here before you go. in Italy in july we had a very complicated map that had been bought on a previous trip.....it showed roads but also all the typography and was a little over whelming to read. I had a rick steves map, which helped us focus in on the tourist site we were looking for.

For trips covering a lot of ground in France and in Italy, we've used Michelin spiral-bound altlases (not sure about the "road" versus "touring" . . . but get one with an acceptable scale so you can see details about highway exits and smaller roads you may need to take. Our Italy atlas has a yellow cover, France from a few years ago is red. They're not tiny, and have the mass of a large book, but are really handy for providing detailed road information for the whole country, and the spiral format is simpler in a small car than dealing with fold-out maps. Scenic overlooks, castles, ruins and other landmarks are also marked, which is a plus.

We've not used a GPS in Europe but now have a car at home with GPS built in. It's been hit-and-miss, with the system sometimes telling us we're at our destination when we still have some distance to go, and sometimes (like just this weekend, traveling on I-70 towards Kansas) telling us to bear left on the Interstate when we really just needed to continue straight on the highway. Postings on this Forum have also reported a GPS directing drivers to what's basically a goat path thru a field, rather than the road they expected to be following. A reliable paper map (like in a Michelin atlas) is a good resource.

It does sound like you can stick to fairly main roads that will be covered on most maps. If you were scouring Provence or Tuscany, then you would want more detail in those areas.