Most mapping sites, as well as providing driving directions, will provide the distance too.

Mapquest.com provides mileage figures between locations in Europe or within the UK as do Greenflag's routeplanner. Google Maps, meanwhile, is country specific and so only handles UK wide mapping requests.

Indo.com enables three types of query to its distance search engine, distances between US cities, distances between cities and countries, and distances using latitude and longitude. Searches between cities and countries can be limited as the search engine draws from a database of only 500 non-US cities.

Another alternative is Google Earth , a free download that "combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips."

It is a virtual globe from which you go zoom in to a scale of 50m using up to date satellite images. The resolution is good enough to pick out cars easily. As well as the odd topless sunbather.

One of the tools in Google Earth is a measure device which can be operated to calculate the as the crow flies distance between placemarks.

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