January 7, 2004 -- While we've always encouraged getting lost on your vacation to discover the undiscovered (that's part of the fun), driving in Europe can sometimes be complicated -- nightmarish, even, to the unfamiliar. The warrens of one-way streets, name changes and roundabouts make European cities horrors of confusion for American drivers used to long, straight roads, easy to read signs and clearly visible streetlights.
It's possible to make European cities much more navigable with a little help from technology. If you're renting from Auto Europe (www.autoeurope.com) for instance, you can get a Global Positioning System (GPS) computer for your car which will show your position on a tiny little map on the dashboard ().
That'll cost you at least $124, though. (It's $99 per week or $299 per month for the rental, plus a $35 delivery fee.) We have a cheaper idea. If you plan to bring a laptop computer to Europe, you can roll your own navigation system with the help of Autoroute 2004 from Microsoft. (www.microsoft.com/autoroute).
Autoroute is a mapping-and-directions program that piles complete street maps for Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Oslo and Helsinki into one sleek little CD. It'll plan out any driving route for you in or between any of those countries or cities -- and what's most important is -- it knows all the one-way streets.
We can't emphasize this enough. If you're in a car, most street maps of European cities are useless because of the one-way streets. Autoroute fixes that problem, provided you're willing to have a navigator sitting in the passenger seat with an open laptop calling out turns. The program can even hook up to a separate GPS unit (such as the one Auto Europe rents out) to show you exactly where you are on its detailed maps.
If you won't have a laptop on your trip, of course your flexibility with Autoroute will be limited. The program prints out great maps for shorter city journeys. The maps for longer journeys tend to be very zoomed out, not showing the details of highway interchanges and such.
Autoroute isn't perfect, but it is really good. In Barcelona, for instance, it had a habit of referring to little tails of streets as "Local Road" and giving slightly confusing directions through roundabouts, but it managed to get a car through the Gothic Quarter, which is nigh-impossible without local knowledge or assistance. When we sent it on a chase in London, it found the fastest routes even when they weren't the most direct ones.
The program also illuminates restaurants and attractions along your path, making it easy to take spur-of-the-moment excursions or simply lay your head at the nearest roadside hotel when you get tired.
There's only one catch. You can't buy Autoroute in the US. It just isn't sold here. So you either have to buy Autoroute in Europe -- expect it to cost around $70 at major computer stores -- or go to www.ebay.com, where copies of the software show up pretty often. (Don't worry, it'll run just fine on your American PC.) If you're planning a drive (or several) around Europe, especially if you're bringing your laptop on the road with you, it can be a worthy purchase.