Tracy..yes orienting is part of seeing a city but my point is that you do it once for each place you visit...and orienting is at times also a euphemism for getting hopelessly lost but that can also be an adventure. re evenings. I usually travel alone and dont like to arrive in a city I dont know at night as I try to use public transport. Again, taxis add cost but I wont risk the uncertainty of late evening travel unless I am familiar with an area.

Travelbunny, I do understand where you are coming from. I guess we have just had good luck as we've never gotten too lost or had trouble orienting ourselves. We just do lots of research before we leave and arm ourselves with a map and guidebook and we are fine. We have a general plan of how to get around, especially to the hotel, before we get to the location. But when we are out sightseeing we just kind of go with the flow...if a particular street looks interesting we will follow it. I don't worry too much about orienting myself because I do that when I'm out exploring the town.

I don't think I would want to try to navigate a new city if I'm traveling alone at night either, so you have a point. We usually use public transportation, but if I was arriving at night, especially alone, I would probably splurge on a taxi or shuttle.

Tracy

Thankfully most European cities seem to have large city maps posted on many streets and pinpoint where you are at

In Paris for example each Metro entrance has a large map showing where that stop is and there are also large-scale maps of each district

Hard to get lost forever with these ubiquitous maps