With the time for us to leave on our journey almost upon us it means the deadline for us to have our routes planned and finished is almost upon us too. For some cycling touring, a flexible itinerary is possible. However when you are part of a team of eight, with limited time it is often better to have as much planned beforehand as possible, and this latter approach is what we have taken for our End-to-End. It has meant not only having a route planned from one stop to the next, but also planning so that we have an idea of where we are going to have lunch, and where we are going to pick up provisions for evening meals.

Most of our team have Garmin’s and we will be following the routes using these. We also have a number of smartphones as back up. Since our journey is in the UK, we are not cycling tremendous distances, and are pretty much always close to habitation, these should be sufficient.

We are fairly new to cycle touring and are still feeling our way around the plethora of mapping tools available for route planning on the Internet, and for GPS devices and smartphones. Just heading over to the CTC Forums and it is easy to be overwhelmed with the sheer range options and route advice.

In the end though there is often nothing quite like devising the route yourself. From the beginning for the E2E we had decided to stay at YHA’s where possible. We had also decided that this was a leisure trip and we didn”t want to cycle too far each day, a distance of about 50 miles daily was fine. To an extent where the YHA”s were situated dictated much of the route. Where there weren’t many YHA’s, the North-West of England for example, then alternative accommodation was found at Travelodge’s and similar.

Once the overnight accommodation had been found the next stage was to map the routes. For this we find Bike Route Toaster to be the best choice. It uses both Google and OpenStreetMap for the plotting engine, and also has an overlay for OpenCycleMaps. Google”s Street View functionality has also proved useful when wanting to take a closer look at certain places.

For choosing the route itself we have used a combination of CTC’s recommended route as a guide, OpenStreetMaps recommended route, followed National Cycle Network routes where practical, avoided main roads if at all possible, and tried to keep both the distances and amount of climbing down too.  These routes were then modified where necessary to ensure we pass eating places and somewhere to pick up provisions as near to our nightly destination as possible.

So there we have it. The routes are almost ready. Now we just have to test them out by cycling them. Of course this being an E2E we are unlikely to be able to recce the route first! It may therefore mean that somewhere along the line the plotting engine has chosen a walking route that turns out to be a quick trip across a field that it is too late to alter. However since we”re about to be adventurers we won”t worry about that. We will only really worry if the SatNav is suggesting we turn left and that way is pointing to the sea (unless we are at JOG of course)!