The Scramble

We spent so much time doing our darn renovation that we arrived at the end of February- beginning of March with nothing done or planned about this trip. We know that every other cycle tourist has lots of preparations to do before leaving for a long trip far from home. Everyone has to buy a plane ticket, stop the mail, pack the bike, pack the clothes, etc. and finally, wash the dishes and lock the door. So maybe it's self centred to think that we have more to do than others. And if we do, it is most likely ourselves that create the need for extra work.

On the other hand, we can not see a way out of some of this stuff.

The first major area that is a scramble is maps. We have tons of maps, guides, souvenir pamphlets, even GPS tracks, stacked up for every (European) country, state, or region that we know about. But how can these be organized to help us on a trip?

Lots of info here, but lots of pounds too.

This efficient looking solution to navigating on tour is not so great.

First off - the baseline fact. If we were to take a purist approach and just select the Michelin road map for where we think we want to go, for this trip there would be 20 maps weighing three pounds for France alone. What's more, folding and refolding such maps is almost impossible on the bike, in the wind and possible rain. In fact, depending on your skill level it's none too easy even in the living room.

Even under ideal no wind or rain conditions you can not expect Steve to get this into his map case.

The second approach is to use guidebooks. These have the advantage of only containing the portion of maps that are relevant to a given route. On the other hand they are full of words, plus helpful heavy covers and bindings. Here are just a few of the guidebooks that would cover our current trip. They weigh - yes, three pounds too (or potentially much more depending what would get included).

Bikeline books and other guides are great, but heavy.

So what we actually end up doing is to scan the portions of our various materials (maps, guidebooks, pamphlets) that will help, and to reassemble them on paper sized to fold and fit in our map cases.It makes a lot of use of a scanner and a colour printer. That's great. Only thing, this time around (which is typical) we created about 700 computer files - scans, screen captures, and the like. Then we compressed these into 250 8.5x11 pages, ok, 125 double sided. That's a lot of work. But the whole thing now weighs just 1 1/2 pounds, which we can manage. Time required to achieve this miracle? About a week of both of us, full time. Grrr.

It boils down to a lot of scanning, printing, and GPX track creating or downloading. The cats of course appreciate the heat generated by burning the lights late into the night.

A special hotspot when it comes to mapping out the route pops up when trustworthy sources put out differing versions of what the way to go actually is. The "best" example we will hit this time is on the Way of St. James. This one thing ate an additional five days of our time, as we struggled to understand why different sources wanted to shove us this way or that. More on that later, but below is an example map. This is a segment in the middle of the Camino. The Yellow line shows the route of Eurovelo 3 - The Pilgrim's Way. The Red is the Jacobsweg, from Bikeline. And the Blue comes from us crawling our way though the sketch maps and text of the Cicerone book: "The Way of Saint James - a Cyclists' Guide". Maybe you will think the differences are not too great, especially if you zoom out. Yeah, they all cross northern Spain, but in detail, if one goes over a mountain and two go around, but in heavy traffic, it makes a difference!

The second major scramble area is the bikes. We read one blog where two people cycling the Camino just took a train to near the Spanish border, walked into Decathlon (outdoor store), bought two bikes and zipped back to their hotel - job done. We on the other hand seem to need Bike Fridays, loaded just so, partially disassembled, and folded into suitcases - assuming we remember how they exactly fit. Then we need to arrange a place to ultimately store and pick up the empty cases. More work.

By the time we get past the standard chores and finally wash the dishes and lock the door part we will think pedaling 4500 km is the easy part. Which it is!

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