For the Epic Journey, we are trying to travel light, and that means that detailed maps of the whole of Europe are not coming with us.
In the UK we find that the standard motorists map books have all the detail we need to plan a road-based cycle trip, as all the metalled roads are shown on them and you can even see exactly where the village boundaries are. In France we’ve used the Michelin road atlases very successfully, and these are at a 1:200,000 scale. We just buy the whole book and then (sacrilege!) tear out the pages we need and throw the rest away.
But we’re not sure how appropriate the motorists maps will be in countries that have a lot of cycle paths or indeed not enough roads so we might need to use a few tracks. Time for an extended session with Mr Google to see what other long-distance cyclists have been using… and the answer is… a lot of different things.
I’ve gone for “RideWithGPS” to get us started. It is reasonably good at route design (ie what you do the night before on your kitchen table), reputed to be very good at giving you turn-by-turn instructions and helpfully showing you the map area you are cycling through (ie what you do on the bike), and very good at producing interesting statistics afterwards. It also allows you to choose between different map makers, to help spot suitable or unsuitable routes.
It’s a big risk to be so dependent on e-maps, but we’ll try it out for a couple of weeks and see how we get on.
So the e-quipment will be:
– Hers ‘n’ his iPhones
– A Surface Go for me to use for route planning
– iPad to use for Sid’s blogging and as backup to the Go
– two charge blocks in case the phones eat their batteries in the middle of nowhere
Key apps will be:
- RideWithGPS for planning and navigation (with many other apps on standby)
- Google MyMaps to record the route
- The usual unholy set of TripAdvisor, Expedia, Booking.Com etc for hotel hunting
- Hostels.com app to help us consider less luxurious but more communal hotel options
Plus an awful lot of electric string to keep all the gadgets charged. I’ve ordered a 5-USB charger and a continental charger for the Surface Go to be picked up in Amsterdam so we won’t have to drag any UK plugs/adaptors all the way round.