FAQs about this site and how you can get more out of it

What are POIs?

POI stands for Point Of Interest. They are represented with a name and/or number and GPS-Coordinates in decimal degrees. Example: "28 Merode castle in Westerlo, 51.084320, 4.915045". GPS enthusiasts also call it a "Waypoint".

What is a POI list?

A POI list is a printed list with several, or even many POIs, within a same category.

What is a POI file?

A POI file is an electronic file with all files from one category. The above example can be found in the category "Castles". They can have different file formats. A POI file that can be read by a Tomtom Navigator is in a totally different form than a POI file for Route66 Navigator. For every category in this site, we have created POI files for several different GPS Navigators and Navigation Programs.

What is the difference between a trip and a tour?

We see a Tour as being composed of points from one category, like a castle-tour or a brewery-tour. A Trip contains points from different categories.

Why do you recommend the Firefox browser?

Our site uses some rather sophisticated programming. We did every effort to make everything work correctly in the Internet Explorer browsers, but sometimes readers still have problems to open certain pages. We know from our personal experience that the Firefox browser is much less critical, so if you want to enjoy all our pages and read all the information:

How is this site organized?

Every POI category has it's own page. There you will find a Google Maps map with all the icons for the whole of Belgium. Clicking an icon opens up an Information Window with the number and name of the POI, as it is listed in the Table (POI list) below it.

Clicking one of the underlined numbers in the side-bar to the right does the same. Useful when you would like to know where a chosen point from the list is situated on the Belgian territory.

Here we have been obliged to replace every "é" with "e", every "è" with "e", etc., because the Internet Explorer browsers would not show any icons, and any numbers in the side-bar to the right, with even one French character in one of the names.

You can zoom in and zoom out the map and you can drag it in any direction with your left mouse button. This is very useful if you would like to zoom in a lot on one point. You first drag the point to the center of the screen, so that you can zoom in many times, without the point falling off the map.

You can also switch the map to a Google Earth image. Many castles, old windmills and other POIs can be distinguished in Google Earth. Not all of the surface of Belgium is covered by high resolution imagery though.

Important

This Google Earth application is not the same as the Google Earth in which you can plan trips with the different POIs. For that you will have to run the Google Earth program on your own computer.

At the bottom of the category pages we give some extra information about the different POIs, if available. The goal of this site is not to provide the maximum of information about every POI in every category.

So what is the goal of this site than?

The goal of this site is two-fold:

First it will allow you to plan any trip in any part of Belgium with all the POIs of all the categories.

Second it will allow you to download POI files for your Car GPS Navigator or for your GPS Navigator Program on your pocketPC, pocketPC Phone or Smartphone. This way, driving your planned trip comes down to clicking the successive POIs in the POI directory on your device. And you will see the different POIs with their own icons on the map screen of your device.

How can I plan a trip in Belgium with all these POIs?

In the upper left Navigation Bar on any page choose "All POIs Together" or follow this link to the page. There you will see how it looks like, all the POIs in Google Earth. You will also see that zooming in reduces the number of visible POIs to a reasonable amount of screen clutter.

And we will show you how to plan a small trip around the city of Leuven. Later when you will do it yourself in Google Earth on your own computer, everything will be much clearer.

At the bottom of the page you will find a link to an Introductory page about Google Earth. If you are already familiar with that program, you could skip it, but maybe it will be better to have a brief look anyway.

You will also find a link to "Google Earth and POIs". Here we explain how to load all the POIs to the Google Earth program on your computer. Now the playing can start. You will soon discover many small regions with many POIs that could interest you enough to make them part of a trip, if only you were in Belgium.

How do I get all those POIs into my own GPS Navigator?

At the bottom of the "Google Earth and POIs" page there is a link to the "POIs in GPS Navigator" page. Here you can download the right POI files for your car GPS Navigator or GPS Navigator program. We show you for several systems how to install them on your device. We do not know how to do it for all existing systems, of course. That is why we ask the help of our readers. If you managed to install the POIs on another device/program, please let us know how you did it exactly.

Disclaimer

We have done the utmost to present all information on this site as accurate as possible, but as we depend on so many different sources for this information, we shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information on this site. We invite you to contact us in case that you should discover something incorrect in our information.

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