500 of the World's Most Spectacular Trips - Drives of a Lifetime

This book has some nice pictures. However, many of the places shown are locations most Americans will never get to drive through. If you just want to look at pictures, this book is nice. If you want to find fun drives that you can actually do, there is not many here.

The pictures and descriptions for the drives are breathtaking. I have already been on some of the drives and looking at the pictures makes me feel like I am there again. Can't wait to try out the ones I haven't experienced yet.

I bought two of these for Christmas gifts. I looked through one of them (don't tell!). It is so beautiful! If you never take the drives, the pictures are worth it! And it is packed with suggestions. My nephew loved it and is already making plans! I would recommend this book!

This is the usual NG high quality publication. With its big pictures and small maps, it is easy to add many places to one's travel wish list and to relish memories of places already visited. For each destination, there's a summary of driving distance, recommendations of when to go, and a planning reference to a web-site. The book is organized into sections like "mountains," "sea & shore," etc.

I down-graded my "stars" for two reasons:

(1) There is no over-all way to look at a world map and see where these trips are located. You can use the index at the back of the book but that's not nearly so helpful as a visual map would be.

(2) Since this is a "driving" reference, one would think it would give some clue as to the availability of rental cars and/or motorbikes. Perhaps the authors didn't want their book to become quickly out-dated. But other than referring to something like Lonely Planet publications, the reader is left wondering how he could make many of these trips.

As usual, the store made the purchase easy and inexpensive.

This is a beautiful book, with wonderful photos, and a fascinating list of glorious places to go. But the information is almost useless. There is no way to find the ones where you live, or where you are going, or those that you can do in a day, or a week, or a month. It's a coffee table book - not a travel book. Give us an index with a variety of different sorting criteria. Give us a spreadsheet we can download with all the drives, and attributes like country, state (for US), length, difficulty, etc. I raise you want to maximize your profit, not our received value, but, really, NatGeo, you can do better!

On 3 consecutive pages you have trips to India, Australia, and Germany. This doesn't make any sense. Organizing the book by landscape types (hills & mountains, sea & shore, etc.) may be ok for a coffee table book that you may randomly browse, but for everything else it's rather confusing. Overview maps with the locations of the drives would have been very useful, so you get at least a sense where the locations are -- but that simple addition is missing. That leaves a somewhat unsatisfactory after taste.