Finishing the rough planning, I search for shelter along the journey. Thereby I follow this pattern: first, it should be near the trip, second, the daily coverage should be about 80 to 120 km, thirdly, the accommodation should have a reasonable price and must include breakfast. I do that primarily with booking.com. More about demands on housing under “How I book accommodation”.
The outworked GPX data leads exactly to and from the daily housing along the planned cycle route. These data are downloaded, stored on my smartphone and is the basis for “offline” navigation for the day. For navigation on the smartphone, I use Osmand with preloaded offline maps. Therefore I just following my “red line” during the day. If something unexpected happened, I do some replanning. However, that seldom happens.
Working through the possibilities of the best cycle environment, I create GPX data for the trip. I do that mostly with Bikemap.net. On difficult segments also with Google Map in the satellite view but also use the territorial information. In Italy, for example, the website Bicitalia is best. For planning in Bavaria, I use Bayernnetz for Radler. But also for other countries, there might be useful information on the internet, so that I get the best route for my demand.
Define the Cycle Route
In my opinion, this is the core of a successful holiday. For cycling, I prefer traffic-free cycle lanes, roads or lanes with a restriction on motorised traffic, roads in the quiet countryside with limited traffic. Therefore my planning for the proposed trip is made up studying maps and publications. Not always easy as most maps not showing the quality behind the marked cycle lane.
My overall concept for planning a tour is as follow. For starting planning a journey, I have to have an aim. That could be a town, or a highly rated cycle path, or some other place of interest. Next step for the basic outwork, is the defined start and endpoint, which depends on the available time for the trip. That could be a circle, halve-circle or a straight line. Following that decision, I have to work out how to get to the start and back home from the endpoint, which is not always easy to manage. See more on travel issues with bicycles.