Lonely Planet Provence & Southeast France Road Trips Paperback – July 1, 2015

Useless unless you are taking one of their 4 specific routes. Do not waste your money if you pretty much know what you want to see. Maybe this would be useful for very early planning if no info on the region is had at all. Even the map only has their 4 predefined routes on it, so also of no value to us at least. Disappointed in this.

The 'road trips' book is supposed to contain the driving map - one of the reasons I got the book - should say if its incomplete.

great item

GREAT!

Ok

PROMPT MAILING, FAIR PRICE

I drove around Provence and southeast France for a couple of weeks several years ago (and had an unforgettable time!), so I was excited to have the chance to review this book. As I started to read this guide book, I started nodding and thinking "ok, not great, but not bad either" ... but then I had to stop myself and say: if I was writing a guide book for a road trip around the south of France from scratch, would I write it this way? The answer is no, not at all. Not to be cynical, but it's as if Lonely Planet thought "ok, how can we take our existing guide books and re-package them for a specialized audience with a minimum amount of effort?" Most of the information in this book is in identical or near-identical form in their regular guide books. I appreciate that they added a little bit more driving-specific information, but what they have is barely sufficient. Again, if you were writing a guide from scratch, I'd expect more.For example, I like the themed itineraries and "The Drive" descriptions linking point A to point B, but they don't really give advice for how to actually execute the logistics. In other words, should I try to do a particular itinerary in a linear fashion (unlikely), or should I base myself in one or two cities and do day trips from them? Likewise, the "start" and "end" points don't make a whole lot of sense, given that most people will need to start and finish in a larger city with air or rail links. Moreover, while the itinerary themes were cute, why not include a "best of" tour that allows one to have Roman ruins, lavender, AND art rather than have to choose one theme or the other? The book doesn't help you to prioritize if you wanted to do some kind of "hybrid" trip that mixed-and-matched a few different suggested itineraries.Another major issue: the maps are few and far between, and lack the necessary detail. Most of them are too "zoomed out" (for general orientation) or too "zoomed in" (for walking around the city center) to use for driving. Again, great for a regular tour book, but not for a book specializing in road trips. Michelin maps are great, and you'll need one if you just have this LP guide (which really is inexcusable--if you're going to market this as a "road trip" guide, it should have all the maps you need to actually do the road trips!).The destination guides are a bit skimpy as well. For a book focusing on a specific region, you'd expect it to have all the detail you'd need to choose where to go. Instead, it comes up lacking. As just one example, it completely omits Avignon! Avignon's an interesting and important destination ... this is a short book as it is, so what would it have hurt to add a couple of pages here and there? If this is a guide meant to be used while driving, it doesn't need to be pocket sized--in fact, road atlas-sized might be better!In the end, I just can't recommend this guide. Instead, get the Michelin map for this region and a regular guide book--the regular LP if you must, but I'd recommend Rick Steves' guide much more highly, or the Eyewitness Guide if you'd prefer more illustrations. Try harder next time, LP!

In this 126 page book, mostly lifted From France country guide and France Discover, 18 pages in the back are exactly the same as that of "Chateaux of the Loire Valley Road Trips" (Ok, so one line is off, pushing back the formatting a bit to hopefully fool you). Also a few pages in front are the same stuff you get in every LP. After an extended version of their typical itineraries section, which looks a bit like their Discover series because of the extra pictures, it just moves on to "Destinations", which is a condensed version of their regular country guide (when they were in color for a short time).Also, these few hundred km max drives don't really strike me as a road trip. "Road Trip" has me thinking exciting 6000km loops around the top half of Argentina or most of Turkey, not a spec of France. And they have a section on "driving", which sort of makes sense, except what is there to know about driving in France? It's the same as anywhere else in the West with no particular dangers or pitfalls.Lonely Planet is no longer a couple of happy hippies, they're a giant corporation who want all your money, even if it means manufacturing an entire new line of books right from the desktop with staple footage. I'm continuously amazed how many books repackage the same material.It's really okay. It's fun to look at for a few minutes. But why bother?

A very small book with very little information in it for the price. Definitely be better off spending the same money on a full guidebook to the region.

Arrived ahead of delivery date - very quick. The book is as new - really very pleasedGreat for planning a holiday in France

The random two-sentence descriptions of the cities that they managed to fit in are not very helpful in choosing what to visit. :-/

Some good info, but a far cry from Rick Steves editions.

super