Hpanchmatia:

To reply to your question above about buying European or American versions of the same GPS product (sorry for the delay, I was in Africa for 3 weeks):

First, appreciate that about half the price of any GPSR that comes with street level detail cartography (meaning, a CD that contains detailed map data that you upload to the GPSR) is allocated to the price of the mapping data. You can see this for yourself just by comparing prices on various GPSR's - those that don't come with detailed map data cost between half and a quarter the price of those that come with mapping data.

Garmin does not collect or make the mapping data. They buy it from other companies who specialize in mapping data, and all Garmin does is to compile it in a format that Garmin brand GPSR's can read. It's very similar to buying a computer - IBM makes the hardware and the BIOS, but at least half of what you spend on a computer will be to pay for the software (e.g. Windows operating system, word processor software, etc.).

GPSR's that have routing capabilities and come with CD ROM map data are bundled together as follows: The GPSR will have a basic map burned into it (the basemap), and in the box will be a CD with the detailed maps. You then upload the portions of the detailed maps that you want to use to your GPSR. The North American GPSR's come with a CD containing North American maps, and the European GPSR's come with a CD containing European maps. Likewise, the South African and Australian GPSR's come with South African and Australian basemaps and detail maps, as appropriate.

If you buy a North American GPSR, you get the North American detail map CD, which is useless to you if you plan to ride in Europe. So, now you have to buy (as a stand-alone product) the European CD containing the detail maps. This is very expensive, and will negate any price advantage of buying the kit in America. Plus, you then have a GPSR with the wrong basemap in it.

The bottom line is that it only makes sense to buy the GPSR that comes with the CD containing the detail maps for the region you intend to travel in. In other words, yes, you could buy an American GPSR, and also buy the appropriate map CD for Europe (or South Africa, or Australia) and load it onto a 512 meg chip, and it would work fine (except for the display problem above a certain zoom level) - but doing things that way would be at least as expensive as buying the appropriate region product in the first place, so why bother?

I hope this puts it all in perspective.

PanEuropean