AAA North American Road Atlas 2001 Book

The AAA Road Atlas is designed for you — your reference, your trip planning, your travel ease and especially your enjoyment. It even functions as a teaching tool in learning about states, provinces, capitals and geographic features. Keep it in your car, recreational vehicle, library or family room — but keep it handy, because you will use it. Keep the AAA Road Atlas in mind, too, as an ideal birthday or holiday gift.

The maps begin with an overview of the United States showing the network of major highways; they end with a chart of driving distances between selected cities. The pages between cover the United States, Canada and Mexico. Together, these make up one of the most comprehensive atlases of North America available.

Most states and provinces are treated separately. Prominent cities, large metropolitan areas and many special areas that are particularly popular tourist or vacation destinations receive larger scale and more detailed maps. Colors highlight mountains, lakes, rivers, deserts, glaciers and military reservations as well as national, state and provincial parks and forests.

All major highways and a large number of minor ones are shown on each map. These range from transcontinental thoroughfares to unpaved back-country roads. By checking the legend and the Contents page, you can quickly learn how to determine the types of roads you will encounter on your travels as well as which routes are designated as especially scenic.

The legend also helps you identify and locate towns and cities, ferries, major ski developments, rest areas, AAA-approved camping facilities, distances between towns or highway junctions, time zone boundaries, county boundaries and more. In addition, town names printed in red indicate communities in which there are AAA-recommended lodgings or restaurants.

Besides the array of clearly presented information, each state and province map has two valuable aids. A complete index to towns and cities appears on the same pages as the map; at the edges are handy references to the pages on which the adjoining states and provinces are found. There also is a third aid — the Contents page itself. For reasons of size and usefulness, some of the city and special area maps are placed where you might not immediately find them. A look at the Contents page will help you locate the places you seek.

Nevertheless, there are some things an atlas simply is not designed to tell you. It cannot present such changeable information as current highway construction projects or detours, areas of especially strict traffic law enforcement and seasonal or weather-related road conditions or closures. Nor can it offer information tailored to your personal interests or needs, such as roads that are particularly suitable or unsuitable for recreational vehicle travel. This kind of information can be obtained from state or municipal tourist councils, chambers of commerce and other local sources. AAA members, of course, can obtain all this and much more from the more than 1, 100 club offices in the United States and Canada.

Enjoy your atlas. But do not stop here. The many tips in the following section will help to make your going easy.