Review: Marco Polo USA & Canada maps + Vancouver guide
Disclosure: I received free copies of these maps and books for this review. I did not receive any payment and was not required to write a positive review. Links marked with (eBay⇒) or (Amazon⇒) are affiliate links. This means I get paid a small commission if you buy something after clicking on the links. This money helps to pay for the running of the website.
On our recent trip to the USA and Canada, we covered 3,000 miles and took in a couple of cities, including Vancouver. Needless to say, detailed planning was required to fit all of this into about 2.5 weeks…
Our preparations were helped by copies of Marco Polo’s USA and Canada foldout maps. As you might surmise, each of these maps covers a very large area. So they are excellent for long distance route planning.
When you’re trying to work out how to fit everything in to a short space of time, being able to see the entire area your travelling through in detail is very useful. This is something that electronic solutions like Google Maps or sat navs don’t do very well — if you want to visualise such a large area, you don’t get any detail.
Obviously the flipside of this is that these excellent maps aren’t quite detailed enough for small-scale local navigation. But it’s surprising how much detail they do provide. Although our car had a sat nav which we used for more detailed navigation, these maps were sufficient for a lot of the long distance driving we did.
Technical stuff
The scale of 1:4,000,000 is one of the biggest you’ll find on sale in the UK, in our experience. We found the maps clear and easy to use. Each one included a detachable booklet containing several city maps for major cities (11 for the USA, six in Canada).
Highly recommended for trip planning and long distance driving.
Vancouver & The Rockies
The other guide we received from Marco Polo was the company’s spiral-bound “Perfect Days in Vancouver & The Canadian Rockies”. Sadly our trip didn’t extend to the Canadian Rockies, so the only thing I can say is that the guide redoubled my desire to visit this area.
But we did spend some time in Vancouver and in Victoria, two cities that are covered by this guide. As usual with Marco Polo, the format is very easy to use. All the main highlights are covered by distinct sections. For each of the cities covered by this guide, there’s also an overview and a suggested itinerary for a three-day tour of the city. In Vancouver and Victoria, we adapted these for our own use with great success — these guides are terrific time savers!
Book & Map information
Title: Perfect Days in Vancouver & The Canadian Rockies (buy online from Marco Polo or Amazon (Amazon⇒))
Publisher: Marco Polo
Price: RRP £9.99
ISBN: 978-3-8297-554-3
Maps:
Title: USA (buy online from Marco Polo or Amazon (Amazon⇒))
Publisher: Marco Polo
Price: RRP £6.99
ISBN: 978-3-8297-6739-2
Title: Canada (buy online from Marco Polo or Amazon (Amazon⇒))
Publisher: Marco Polo
Price: RRP £6.99
ISBN: 978-3-8297-6734-7