My evolution of route creation

Al and I met skiing and soon discovered our mutual love of cycling. During our first summer together, we did many short local tours--to Victoria, the Gulf Islands, the San Juan Islands. We didn't have any maps, but the Gulf Islands have very few roads, the San Juans not many more, and Al had lived in Victoria throughout his teens.

Of course, the other reason we didn't have any maps was that there weren't any available (as far as we knew) in 1988 that were suitable to purpose. Our choices were:

The BC Highway Map, available free at any tourist information booth. All of BC on one manageable sheet, but BC is 1200 km north to south and 944,735 square kilometres in area, bigger than France and Germany combined. Not nearly enough detail for cycling.

Canada Topographic maps at 1:250,000 scale had way too much unnecessary information for cycle touring and little of what we needed (names of roads, for instance).

Canada Topographic maps at 1:50,000 scale were okay for hiking but not really great for cycling.

Then, in September 1992, we travelled to France for 4 weeks of cycle touring. I had to take a week without pay to add to my 3 weeks of vacation time but I loved it! Sadly, we didn't get back to Europe until 2015... I'm digressing.

On that trip, we removed our bikes from their cardboard boxes and reassembled them at CDG Airport, then cycled off eastward. At some point that first day, we bought a Michelin Yellow map. Al had used these on his European cycling trip in the mid-1980s but I had never seen one before. Wow! The scale was 1:150,000 or maybe 1:200,000 (I'd check except they are buried in a storage locker) and the level of detail was just right. In villages, each building was shown as a little solid black rectangle, and all the roads! Multiple routes to get almost anywhere! (Even now, in BC, a highway closure can cause major havoc as anyone living in the south Okanagan in February of 2019 could tell you. A landslide north of Summerland meant that the half-hour drive to Kelowna was now 3 hours and more than 300 km longer if you took the shortest alternate route. Digressing again.)

Fast-forward to today and the wide availability of GPS devices. Many cycle tourists seem to use only GPS for navigation, either on their phone or a dedicated GPS device. I actually love my Garmin, at least when it's not acting up, but certainly don't want to rely on it exclusively. I always carry paper maps and one reason I do is what I wrote about on this post from our last tour in France: Baleyssagues to Romagne: Why I carry paper maps. There are other reasons too, one major one being that paper maps give you the big picture. You can only see so much on a little screen.

And here's another reason I like and carry Michelin maps when they are available: scenic routes are highlighted in green. I may not always agree with the map editor's idea of "scenic" but usually, I do.

Photo of a bit of our Michelin map of Andalucía. It's a regional map, 1:400,000, but works well in combination with the more detailed maps available on RideWithGPS. Look at all those scenic roads near Ronda!

My current preference is to obtain my maps before I leave home and use them to create routes. I use RideWithGPS to create gpx files, which Al and I will then upload to our Garmins. We have maps installed on the devices (I have an Edge 810, he now has an 830) which we downloaded free from https://extract.bbbike.org. We have our Garmins set up so routes (courses in Garminspeak) show up as a line on the map, which we can follow or not.

Whether or not we want to blindly follow a route created by RWGPS's algorithms is another question. I like to create these at home on my laptop because, unlike on the mobile versions, it's easy to switch between different map layers--plus, there's StreetView. Here's why, using the example of a route from Ronda to Gaucin:

Here's the route generated by RWGPS without any input from me other than start point (Ronda) and end (Gaucin). The default map is RWGPS. Note that funny business near Atajate. Unpaved surface is indicated. Though surface information isn't reliable, further investigation is warranted.

Switching to "Map" layer and zooming in yields this. Deviation through the town is okay, especially since it looks like there might be food available. But that dashed line might be sketchy...

Streetview shows the route proposed by RWGPS. I don't think I will want to do this on a loaded bike, so editing is called for.

Strangely enough, if you switch to the "Map" layer before creating the route, you get a different result with no funny business in this instance.

It doesn't even go through the town centre! But we can do that if we want.

As for the rest of it, where to go and how far to go in a day, we're all different.

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Brent IrvineJust seeing your posted Michelin map made me smile. I used them on my first tours by connecting those green scenic routes into one longer tour. Now I use Michelin at home sometimes to get a country or regional overview. For plotting a route I use cycle.travel which has cycle routes marked, and like you, check street view to be sure I don't end up in a pickle on the road.
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2 years ago

Rich FrasierThe way you use RWGPS matches the way I do it. I would never rely on an automatically-generated route from any mapping program - I'm too much of a control freak. I check street view on Google Maps for every suspect road. Sometimes I route away from roads that look too busy on street view! One of the map selections on RWGPS is the Open Street Cycling Map. I've had good luck using that one - might be worth a look. Different maps have different opinions on what constitutes a public, accessible road. :)
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2 years ago

Jacquie GaudetTo Brent IrvineI'd heard of cycle.travel and, when I took a look at the website, discovered I even had an account there already! I don't often select cycle routes except near big cities, though, as they are often rail trails which aren't our favourite way to go.
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2 years ago

Jacquie GaudetTo Rich FrasierI use all the views (layers). My favourites, though, are Map and OSM Cycle. And the (relatively) new heatmap function is very useful.
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2 years ago

Steve Miller/GrampiesWe have spent the last two days just getting slightly warmed up to the mapping for our hoped for circumnavigation of the Iberian Peninsula. So reading your mapping story was super fun.

Last night a question came up that I was thinking of putting to a Cycleblaze forum, but I think there is a cluster of mapping fans right here, so here goes:

Open cycle map, which can be seen at its home at https://www.opencyclemap.org/ or as a map choice in many a cycle routing web site, identifies international, national, and regional cycle routes. In so doing, it slaps on a label, like EV1 for Eurovelo 1 or TGT, for the Canadian "The Great Trail". So in planning how to get south into Portugal from Santiago de Compostella, we were happy to see a route that heads south for some 400 km (before mysteriously ending in the middle of nowhere). This route is tagged "CP".

So now the question: Is there a key that reveals what the cryptic tags stand for, as an aid to finding out more about the routes? I did find some tables on the opencyclemap site that revealed a bit of this by country, but I still have no idea what "CP" means.
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2 years ago

Jacquie GaudetTo Steve Miller/GrampiesHi Steve
Your question intrigued me, since (as a result of an answer to a question I posed in the Forum) we are thinking of a future tour from the Basque country to southern Portugal.
My best guess would be "Camino Portugues" and it seems there is both a coastal and a central route. I'm not sure how well they are marked on the ground, though, as most of the information I found with a quick search was for tour operators' versions.
With luck, you will get responses from cyclists who've actually been to Portugal!
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2 years ago

Steve Miller/GrampiesTo Jacquie GaudetYes, we think you are right - we just saw a reference to Camino Portuguse on that "other site". This reference is promising, as it has a lot of these code names mentioned by country:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Cycle_routes#Spain
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2 years ago