A Canadian in France

[+Caluja Clan]

Bonjour mes ami,

 

My wife and I will be spending 10 glorious days touring Paris with a couple of side trips planned. We would like to incorporate Geocaching into our trip. We are coming prepared with our GPS, a couple of TBs and a couple of Canada GeoCoins. Here are my questions,

 

1) What mapping software is used in France that would give detail on highways, roads, streams/rivers, etc? For Canada I have a very detailed topographical map application from Garmin and was wondering if there are similar maps for France that would be compatible with our GPS (eTrex Legend).

 

2) Our first sidetrip is a trip Notrh-East up to Vimy Ridge (near Amiens, I believe) to visit the memorial followed by a driving trip to Rouen and Mont St. Michel, then back into Paris from the west.

 

3) Our next sidetrip is the bullet train to Lyon and then a drive into Loire valley I believe. Our friends want to go to Cote de Rhone.

 

Any assistance through the forum would be great. I'm also open to exchanging email for further, more detailed contact. My writing in French is limited, but I do have access to a translation program. While I'm not bi-lingual, I can get by with some concentration.

 

Kind Regards,

 

Caluja Clan

[+sTeamTraen]

I have Garmin's CitySelect Europe software, but I don't know if you want to spend CDN$250 on software for a 10-day vacation. Also that's not really topo-detail. You can get topo CDs for France at www.gpstopo.com, but at 98 Euros per and 11 needed to cover the whole country, the $$s are going to rack up again.

 

On the other hand, good 1:25000 paper maps are available from any hypermarket.

 

There are several caches near Vimy, including a virtual at the Canadian memorial itself. I was there a few weeks back and the memorial was all in scaffolding and sheeting, but I couldn't tell if it was closed or not (I arrived after opening hours).

 

The TGV to Lyon will be fun, and you are not far from the Côtes du Rhône wine area there. What most people think of as "the Loire Valley" is quite a way over towards the coast, but the Loire is pretty impressive as far west as Briare, where there's an impressive canal bridge (http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GCN7KJ).

 

You could also try the forum at www.geocaching-france.com.

 

Nick