Question 1

Start/end point

Accepted Answer

Let's start with planning the route. For some, this will be an important thing to do ahead of departure, while others will prefer to leave it open-ended and figure it out on the go. Both options are of course totally fine. However, I did love the fact that I 'overplanned' my routes for the trips. 
​
Maybe a good thing to start is to decide where you want to start and finish. For me, I knew I wanted to do a loop, starting and ending in my hometown of Delft. I tried to avoid having to worry about packing my bike and bags up for a train or a plane ride. Plus I felt that riding a loop would also give me a greater sense of achievement.

Question 2

Finding a line between

Accepted Answer

With a start and end point the battle to find the in-between starts. I wanted to stick to either cycleways, forest trails or smaller roads in Europe. I didn't want to have to battle all the traffic I do day in and day out in Australia. 
Luckily in Europe, you have something called "The European Cycle Route Network"(https://en.eurovelo.com/). Also known as the EuroVelo routes, which are signposted, long-distance, cycle routes between various countries. These routes are where I started my planning for my trip off and which I followed for most of the time.

I love Google MyMaps for a lot of reasons, which I will get to in more detail in a bit. So because the EuroVelo website wasn't giving me the right detailed overview in map form, I decided to plot all the EuroVelo routes in a MyMaps. This gave me an overview of which part of which EuroVelo route I could do, then connect to the next one and build out the entire loop.
You can find that map here (https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1Ep0qFgCA_xfcrTmbfpOmITTl9h6q2ZA&usp=sharing)so you can use it to plan your trip, if you are a bit particular like me with maps.

If you are not in Europe and don't have the EuroVelo routes, you will need to start a little more from scratch. However, some other websites can help you out. A good one is the bikepacking website.(https://bikepacking.com/) This website has a lot of well-mapped out routes, tips to go with that route and also just a lot of great reviews of gear. Another would be Komoot (https://www.komoot.com/)or using heatmaps on Strava (https://www.strava.com/)to see where people ride in the parts you want to ride through. 
​
I had my start and finish point; Delft, and I figured out the points I wanted to hit between. These points were cities I wanted to experience or where family/friends were living. By connecting some different EuroVelo routes, I found a rough line I wanted to take and from there I started. Some people will stop here with the planning. They know the rough line between the points they want to go to and just follow the signs along the way or plot a simple GPX file on their bike computer. This will absolutely be enough info to manage.

Question 3

Mapping more than a line

Accepted Answer

That line, that was and is not enough info for me though. Me and my overplanning went a bit further. I cropped all the gpx files of the EuroVelo routes I wanted to connect to only the pieces of these long routes that I needed. This I did with this gpx studio website (https://gpx.studio/)where you can upload gpx files, then cut parts away and merge different bits to a single gpx file again. It's a lot to explain here. So if you decide to do this, don't be alarmed if you don't get how it works in one go. Another way to do his would be with RideWithGPS,(https://ridewithgps.com/) but you will need to have the paid membership to be able to cut down gpx files.
​
Once I had combined the cropped EuroVelo gpx files into files, I of course made another Google MyMaps so I could visualize the trip. Note that I did not use this Google MyMaps to actually navigate. That is what I used my bike computer for, but I often also just followed the EuroVelo signs along the road.
The map for  the trip in 2023 you can find here,(https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1HOO4TVj5-XkwZRe6e6ZQIUZx_guIB_Y&usp=sharing) where I knew I wanted to go to Basel, Vienna and Berlin.

The reason I love Google MyMaps:
- They let you put points, routes, photos and descriptions in.
- You can then open the link to the MyMaps in your Google Maps app on your phone without having to do something extra
- Bonus point is that you can see not only the locations and routes you plotted, but you can see your current location alongside it. 
So with a Google MyMaps, I had an overview of the route I wanted to take. In 2023 I went overboard and added in points of interest along the way as well as all campsites. Looking back after this trip, I knew that this was way too much planning as I maybe only used that layer like 30x along the way. In 2024, I made the Google MyMaps and the gpx files for it, but I didn't add points of interest or campsites to the map as I didn't feel I needed it. 
​
I ended up using the app Campy to find campsites along the way, the website  Camping info, a(https://www.camping.info/en)s well as just typing in camping in the Google Map app.
​
You can see the layers with campsites and the other 'stuff' by clicking on the expand button left of "Europe 2023".

Question 4

Spreadsheet time

Accepted Answer

After all this, I had the route and a rough idea of how long the trip between the cities I wanted to go was. This made it possible to figure out how long I roughly needed. I wanted to know this so I could inform friends and family when I would be able to meet them in these cities. 
​
In 2023 the plan looked something like this when I left on my trip.

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/76d59a_16fa658ec7954340a0963eab159eafe2~mv2.png

But in 2024 the plan looked more like this. I calculated the distances with the parts of the EuroVelo.

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/76d59a_abc4b463c6da4333b79404ff86f41251~mv2.png

The reason I created a 'ride plan' was to figure out how many days I had and how fast/slow I could go. In 2023, I had a hard deadline of the 3rd of August to be back in The Netherlands for a wedding. So I didn't feel I could go 'with the flow' and risk being way too far away from Delft at the start of August. In 2024, I didn't really have a hard deadline, and this made the trip a lot more flexible and ended up different than I planned for initially. 
​
The routes I cut down and created, I loaded into the app MapOut where you can easily select parts of the course and then see how many kilometers and meters of elevation the selected bit is. During the planning phase in 2023, I thought about riding 60-70km a day. So I took chunks of that amount of kilometers for each day and built a rough plan in a spreadsheet to visualize when I would be where. For each of the parts I also built in 'Bufferdays' to make up for staying an extra night in a city, if I wanted to take a detour or for any unforeseen circumstances I would run into. Having these extra days worked out well in the end because it made me more flexible, while still sticking to the plan.
​
Besides being an overplanner, I'm also a data nerd. So in the above-mentioned spreadsheet, I also kept track of the kilometers I'd ridden, the elevation I tackled and how much money I spent paying for a campsite each night. See the screenshot below of the first 27 days of my 2024 trip.

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/76d59a_77ae274f49f4434b85eaf95faeeee79b~mv2.png

Question 5

You have a route

Accepted Answer

I guess that is all that I did for the planning of the route. It was a lot and as said, I didn't do all of what I did in 2023 for the 2024 trip and it was still perfect. If I were to ever do a trip like this again, I would still get all the gpx's and load them into the app MapOut. I would also make a spreadsheet to see a rough plan of how many days I'd need to complete the plan.

The beauty of a holiday is that you can do heaps or almost no planning! But a bit of planning might be smart for a bike trip, so I'll tell you what I did (wrong)!

The beauty of a holiday is that you can do heaps or almost no planning!
But a bit of planning might be smart for a bike trip, so I'll tell you what I did (wrong)!