This spring, Mr. Athena and I are planning on jumping into the convertable and heading east, through Ontario, into Quebec, and hopefully all the way to Prince Edward Island. In order to facilitate this, I want a good Road Atlas. Here in the US, I tend to use Rand McNally’s, which sometimes sticks Canada on the back 2 or 3 pages. I was looking for something better - something like a “Rand McNally Canada Road Atlas” on Amazon, but when I do a search on “Road Atlas Canada” lo and behold, all I get are the US ones with 3 pages of Canada and 2 of Mexico!
Ack!
Can someone please suggest to me a decent atlas of Canada? Or better yet, just Eastern Canada, since we won’t be going any farther west than Sault Ste. Marie.
While you’re at it, how about travel guides? Any particularly good ones?
I think what may be confusing is that there is no “Canada Road Atlas.” At least, if there is, I’ve never seen one, and I’ve done a lot of driving across Canada. You can, however, get excellent provincial road maps, often free of charge from the provincial government in question. Search for the tourism web sites of the provinces you plan to visit, and see if they can send you maps and guides–most tourism offices will be glad to.
The MapArt atlases are excellent as well, and very easy to find. In addition to their provincial series, they have some of the most detailed city maps I’ve seen for Canadian cities. Certainly they are far better than the microscopic ones that you find in the Rand-McNally USA/Canada/Mexico atlases. Those give the impression that places like Toronto and Montreal are small and easy to navigate when in fact, they are as huge and as complicated as any major American city. The MapArt ones do our cities justice.
If you’re a member of AAA, you can get all the maps and travel guides you need from them–in fact, when I visit my local CAA, the maps and guides I get for Canadian provinces are all published by AAA. Ask for provincial maps, of course, but also get the guide to Ontario, and the guide to the Atlantic Provinces and Quebec (for some reason, they’ve combined the Atlantic provinces and Quebec into one guide).