Plan your route

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)!

Of course, as you can expect from an event manager, I planned my big 'event' slightly differently than most 'normal' bike packers. There were hours of reading about routes, downloading routes, mapping routes, changing mapped routes, looking at Google Street View, finding campsites through various websites, checking out Google again and of course making a massive spreadsheet.

Not everything was necessary to do, but being unemployed at that moment in life, I had the time to overthink and spend all the time doing these things. But when planning my next trip, I will 100% do certain things I did again. While I will skip some of the excessive overthinking I did for the trip in 2023.

Below is an outline of what I did to plan my route and would or wouldn't do again.

Start/end point

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 route for this trip in the summer of 2023.

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 didn't want to have 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.

Mapping more than a line

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 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 this would be with RideWithGPS, 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 four different files (Delft to Basel, Basel to Vienna, Vienna to Berlin and Berlin to Delft), I of course made another Google MyMaps so I could visualize the trip. Note that I did not use this map 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 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 van see your current location alongside it.

Not sure how to use the map, head to the FAQ's for tips on how to navigate the map below.

So with the above Google MyMaps, I put in the four gpx files in and started adding points of interest. Which, at that point in time, I thought were campsites and supermarkets/cafes/etc along the way. Looking back after this trip, I now know that this was way too much planning and I maybe only used that layer like 30x along the way.

The layer of campsites was pretty handy though. Looking the night before at how long I would ride the next day, I could see where there were or weren't campsites along the route and figure out how long a day was going to be. I found the campsites by just looking at the map and spotting them, using Google Maps and Camping info.

You can see the layers with campsites and the other 'stuff' by clicking on the expand button left of "Europe 2023" or by visiting the 'real' website by clicking the full-screen button in the top right corner.

Finding a line between

With a start and end point the battle to find the in-between started. 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 did day in and day out in Australia.

Luckily in Europe, you have something called "The European Cycle Route Network". Also known as the EuroVelo routes, which are signposted, long-distance, cycle routes between various countries. These routes is where I started my planning and on which I based my entire 7220km trip.

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 so you can use it to plan your trip, if you are a bit particular like me with maps.

Not sure how to use the map, head to the FAQ's for tips on how to navigate the map below.

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. 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 or using heatmaps on Strava to see where people ride in the parts you want to ride through.

I had my start and finish point; Delft, and I had three points I wanted to hit between; Basel, Vienna and Berlin. These three cities all have some people living in it that I care about and it was a perfect way to spend time with them and take a well-deserved break from riding a bike for a few days. 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.

Spreadsheet time

After all this, I had the route and a rough idea of where I could camp along the way.

With all those campsites on the map, I was able to do some more 'overplanning', but did help me a lot in figuring out how long I would have/need to complete the planned route.

The reason I created a 'ride plan' was to figure out how many days I had and how fast/slow I could go. 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. I also needed to give my friends/family in Basel, Vienna and Berlin a rough estimate on when I would be crashing on their couch.

I loaded my gpx files into RideWithGPS where you can easily select parts of the course and then see how many km's and meters of elevation the selected bit is. During the planning phase, 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 on when I would be where. For each of the four 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 I got to take a detour to the trendy city of Munich, check out Jena and ride around the island of Texel.

I ended up taking the spreadsheet really far. Besides being an overplanner, I'm also a data nerd. So I wanted to keep track of the kilometers I'd ridden, the elevation I tackled and how much money I spent paying for a campsite each night. Below is what the first part of my trip looked like in a spreadsheet after I arrived in Basel, with the filled in kilometers and prices for campsites for each day.

You have a route

I guess that is all that I did for the planning of the route. It was a lot and as said, I won't do all of that for my next trip. I would still get all the GPX's and create a spreadsheet to see a rough guideline of how many days I'd need to complete the plan. But I wouldn't go add all supermarkets etc into a MyMaps, because seriously... Only unemployed people have time for that kind of work.

Plan your route

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)!