We found ourselves at a loose end this morning, the weather was iffy. So we took a pleasant train ride into London for a wonder. We had the forthcoming road trip on our minds.

We are considering are plans for the summer trip, so we spontaneously decided we’d pop to the Stanfords map shop in London. Those of you who don’t know it. This is probably the best place to purchase maps and travel books in London. It has three floors of books and maps normally in the scale you need.

I would go as far as saying that Stanfords is an Overlanders essential resource. Be aware that you will probably lose hours in this place, so put some time aside.

In the end we found most of what we were looking for:

• Bradt Albania Guide – Over the years we have for the most part found that we prefer the Bradt Travel guides to the Lonely Planet guides. We prefer the way the content is laid out.
• 1:150k Kosovo map
• 1:200k Albania map
• 1:400 Bulgaria map
• 1:500k Romania / Moldova map

The latter two are not ideal scales for what we need but they’ll do. I’ll probably get better scales if I can find them.

Unfortunately I also could not find a decent Macedonia map so had to resort to Amazon for that and a Kosovo and Macedonia guide book.

If you get the chance you should pop in, it is a pretty cool shop to get any kind of travel info, hiking maps or otherwise.