USERS OF BASECAMP AND TOPO FRANCE V4 PRO BEWARE.
I am walking the length of France from Cherbourg to Menton in stages. I plan each stage using BaseCamp and Garmin TOPO France maps. I aim to cover around 25kms a day, every day, for around eight days. I finished my latest stage of eight days last week. On my final day, Wed 27 April 2016, my planned walking route took me directly across the Camp de Canjuers, from Verignon to Comps-sur-Artuby, close to Draguignan in the South of France. It was only on the morning of the walk, as I was transposing my intended route onto an IGN Top 100 paper map, that I realised that the route that Garmin had planned for me took me across what is very clearly (from the paper map) a military firing range to which access is forbidden. Indeed, on the ground, there are signs every 50m stating that to enter the range is a criminal offence which carries, I have since discovered, a penalty of one year in prison and a Euro 15 000 fine.
As a result of this, I was forced to replan my day's walk on the ground, at considerable inconvenience. I was obliged to walk mostly on roads, which I try to avoid, and have ended up somewhere I hadn't intended to be. Fortunately, it was the last day of the walk and not the first. Had it been the other way around, I would have had to replan the entire walk, away from home and with limited resources.
This was by no means the only problem I had but it was by far and away the most serious. Other minor issues involved the software trying to take me over private property and on tracks that don't exist on the ground.
USERS OF BASECAMP AND GARMIN TOPO FRANCE V4 ARE URGED TO CROSS CHECK THE VALIDITY OF ANY PLANNED WALK BEFORE THEY SET OUT. DO NOT RELY ON GARMIN ALONE.
