Let's Go 2005 Western Europe (Let's Go Western Europe)

Rating:
Summary: Okay
Review: This is a pretty good all-in-one guide. The only thing I regret is the organization and layout, which seems somewhat difficult to deal with (perhaps unavoidable in an all-in-one). In my opinion, the Fodor's guides are still the best for no-nonsense information when you need it, with as little frustration as possible. Blue guides are excellent city-walk companions (for those with an appetite for history), and Rick Steves can be helpful for general planning and travel ideas. The biggest frustration is that I can't seem to find any one book I would actually carry with me for the whole trip.

I don't think I would take this book with me. Unlike the Fodor's guides, it fails to use a common-sense numbering system to correlate descriptions with maps and areas of the cities. So, for example, when I'm looking at Paris I see the map on one page with the tourist sights numbered and briefly described, but then on the following pages there follow more detailed descriptions of the same sights with no numbers. Furthermore, the book does not seem to adequately divide sight-seeing areas on the basis of geography, preferring instead to dump information on the reader en masse. But perhaps this is the nature of a book like this.