Route Planning

Route planning and its cousin, in-ride navigation are two pretty important aspects of bikepacking. You can wander lonely as a cloud if that's what you want to do, but most people will want to get from particular points on the map, A to B using a route that they like. 

What makes a route a good route?

This is a question whose answer will vary from person to person. Most of us will want relatively quiet roads, without too much traffic but there will be those whose priority is speed or the reduction of the distance to be cycled to a minimum. Some people will be happy to cycle further if it means avoiding the worst / best (depending on your point of view!) hills. 

Personally, I like quiet roads, amazing views and for there to be the occasional place I can stop at to get a coffee and essential food like... cake. And I quite like hills. 

I Like Hills - On Alpes d'Huez, May 2019

I'm likely to have time constraints too, so the relative distance of route options will always be a factor even if finding the shortest route between to points is not my number one priority.

Route Planning

When I'm thinking of planning a route, three things occur to me:

1. The availability of official cycling routes that I could use

2. The experience of other cyclists undertaking a similar journey

3. Tools

Official Cycling Routes

France

It's 2020. And with my wife, we were all set to undertake our first ever, totally self-organised bikepacking holiday. And then Covid-19 struck and that was the end of that.

The plan had been to spend a couple of weeks cycling in France, taking our bikes across the English Channel from England where we live and then cycle about 400 miles. We researched options for constructing a route from anywhere we could get a ferry to from England and found two official cycling routes, each of which looked very appealing. 

The first was La Vélodyssée, which is a 1240 km route from northern France, largely hugging the Atlantic coast and ending near the border with Spain.

The second was La Vélo Francette , which stays inland, passing through the French countryside from Ouistreham to La Rochelle.

Ultimately, we chose the second option. Either offered a superb basis for our holiday though. The point is, we didn't have to stick rigidly to the official route, but could use it as the foundation for something customised for our preferences. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, France has plenty of long and interesting looking cycle routes, and you can see some of them at the France Velo Tourisme web site.

Europe

Perhaps the most exciting discovery made whilst researching bikepacking in France, was of the incredible looking Eurovelo network. This amazing network of national and international routes could keep you happy for a lifetime. Take a look at the map and just imagine....

Building your own route, based more or less on an official cycle route has obvious advantages and it's where I would generally start with my planning.

Other Cyclists

Google (or some other favourite internet search engine) will help you find blogs and cycling forum discussions about bikepacking in general and about journeys just like yours. This is a great way to pick up tips about the route, the likely weather conditions, availability of places to stay and so on.

Route Planning Tools

This is where it gets interesting. We are spoiled for choice these days, with sophisticated web sites and mobile applications that make route planning relatively easy. Now rather than explore and compare a wide selection of tools, let me tell you what I use.

1. Plotaroute

My favourite tool for planning routes is plotaroute. It's really easy to use and will automatically find paths along roads or trails between two points using its Auto Plot function. In Auto Plot mode, you can indicate that you want routes that are suitable for cycling and it will do its best to achieve just that.

Toggle the Hills feature and a profile of your route appears at the bottom of the screen, which is really handy.

Once you've plotted your route, you can export it as a KML file, which is useful if you want to use a different application for navigation along the route.

Plotaroute can be used free of charge, in exchange for advertisements being displayed in a fairly unobtrusive way or you can pay an annual fee, which is a very reasonable amount and lose the adverts and gain some other benefits. I have a paid-for account and it's worth every penny.

2. Google Maps

No big surprise here. Google Maps is great for quick and easy route plotting, provided your route requirements are straightforward. Enter your start location and destination, indicate you're travelling by bike and let Google do the rest. It's also pretty good for in-ride navigation. But that's a topic for another day.