Useful Information

Location

Every show cave, mine or subterranea on this site has a short list of hard facts called Useful Information. With a contemporary browser it will be displayed like this text, with smaller font and darkgreen letters on white background.
In the Useful Information block you find information in a very brief form, which makes some explanation necessary.
It is very difficult to write dates, fees and hours in a well readable manner, so we always tried to find a sort of "international" way of writing it, which should be understood by anybody. But if you do not understand it, here is the explanation:

The location of the cave or mine, and how to get there. The older pages just have a description of how to get there. But times change, and we added two more things to support modern navigation devices. Most allow destinations using street address and latitude/longitude coordinates. So all pages which were created or updated during the last years have actually three lines:

address: input for your navi/google maps if available. Many sites unfortunately do not have one, due to the remoteness or country-specific restrictions.
description: how to get there from the nearest big city or motorway. Typically, that starts with the motorway or highway, exit number and/or name, description of the route to the object. This text is formulated in keywords and kept as short as possible.
coordinates: given in a decimal (lat, long) notation. If you copy and paste the numbers into Google Maps, Google Earth, OpenStreetMap or any other mapping tool it should work immediately.

showcaves.com exists for 30 years now, and at the beginning of the internet in the early 1990s, there was no mapping tool available. So we added the country-specific coordinate system, e.g. Gauß/Krüger in Germany, or we used different systems, which were offered by the most commonly used map or atlas. When the first mapping sites started, we added links to them, the most notable was MapQuest for Great Britain. Many of them collapsed over the years, some changed their interface, so it was necessary to maintain the links continually. All those systems work only for the respective country, and some require paper maps, so we replaced them one by one with the upper system. We have—at least on the newer pages—the address for a navi, the description and the coordinates in three lines, in the Location section of Useful Information. Then we have links to a Google kmz POI and to OpenStreetMap in the link section at the bottom. We hope they will be more stable than other systems, so far they have been.

All distances are given in the metric system. If you have difficulties with it, here is a little transformation tool. It works in both directions!

miles		kilometers
	<->

feet		meters
	<->