A Map for Every Direction

Right next to my computer sits a bookshelf which contain an assortment of travel books from all of the places we have ever been to. Along side the books sit a variety of language dictionaries (English-French, English-Spanish, English-German and so on) but on the bottom shelf are the maps. On average, we seem to pickup about 4 new maps for every trip and right now we have a stack of maps about 15 inches high. Usually we get one map for the country that we’re going to and also one map for each large city that we’ll visit. As you might imagine, we’ve gotten to know what we like in a map and what we don’t.

For example, last year’s trip to France was the first time that we brought some maps made by Michelin. For European destinations, Michelin is one of the big guns in the map world. It seemed to be a natural fit that getting maps of the different regions of France would be best served from a French company like Michelin.

We ended up getting two Michelin maps for the Burgundy and Provence regions. We ended up doing a lot of driving in those areas and we ended up concluding that the Michelin maps, while extremely detailed, were far too large to be used while driving in a car. Seriously, these maps would fold out to about 4ft x 5ft so flipping from one section of the map to another would almost take up the entire space in the car – an accident waiting to happen. In future, we’ll go with smaller maps.

For traveling around cities (which we usually do on foot or by subway), a big bulky map would be even worse. We’ve found that having a map that can open and close quickly is ideal. Being laminated in plastic, even better so if it’s raining the map won’t become a soggy mess. The ideal map that we’ve found that meets all of these criteria is the National Geographic Destination Maps.

While the National Geographic Destination maps don’t have issues for every city that we have wanted to go to, they seem to cover most large cities in North America and Europe. What I really like about the maps (beyond the features above) is that they usually have a convenient guide for the local subway system as well as these nicely drawn three dimensional image of the local landmarks (like the Coliseum or the Eiffel tower) making it easy to find a place in a city in reference to these landmarks.

We’ve bought two more National Geographic maps for Rome and Florence for the upcoming Italy trip but had to resort to another brand (Insight Flexi Maps) for the map for Milan. We’ll see if it turns out to be as good as National Geo’s maps this fall.

We usually buy our National Geographic maps online from either Chapters or Amazon.ca.

Baden