It seems a lot of touring cyclists use Ride with GPS, or similar sites, that find routes between start and end points that you give them, with the possibility of adding waypoints in between. We like to call such routing "algorithmic", although how they actually produce their results is not common knowledge.  Testing out various routying sites for trips in our region, where we know all the quirks of every possible route, we see quite a bit of variation in suggested routes, and some can be quite nonsensical.

Our preference is to use "curated" routes, published by some kind opf known entity - like the Eurovelo routes.  But again, who knows what criteria were used to determine the route? In some cases, it seems that towns or attractions exerted a bit of influence to get on the itinerary. We could see that with the German Romantische Strasse (Roman Road). Or perhaps some route planner can feel it is neat to climb a hill rather than go around. We think we saw this with the Bikeline Pilgrim's Route in Spain.

In general we prefer to risk it with a human plannner's preferences over an algorithm's decisions.

To actually find the available regional, national, or international routes, and to get the .gpx files for them, two sites are standouts. These are cycle.travel - best for England, but with some coverage for France and Germany, and biroto.eu - best overall European coverage. For both of these, the magic is that when you mouse over or click on a route, it lights up, and you are just one more click away from info and gpx about it. This allows great freedom in seeing where you can go, and on which routes. (Apologies here to riders in America. Your closest equivalent is Adventure Cycling. And condolences to those trying to use a smartphone, without a mouse or stylus!)

Once the routes that we intend to travel on are in hand, in the sense that we have their gpx's, a tidying up step is to cut out the specific part of a possibly long route that we are going to be on. The free Windows program GPX Editor does this rather well, and there is also the web site gpx.studio can do this as well. After that, it's a fairly easy leap to get all the routes into our smart phone that serves as a GPS. We have an Android phone, and use the app Osmand+.

All of the above is directed to finding a route and getting it into a GPS device. For the past several trips, we have flirted with declaring the mapping job then done. But each time we chicken out, and try to get something on paper into our map cases. Paper maps are costly, bulky, and can sometimes cover a lot of area where we are not cycling at all. To combat that, we usually scan maps, crop them, and reprint in map case convenient form. Scanning, cropping, printing, to cover 3000-5000 km takes several weeks of evenings. It's a great couples' activity, with Dodie saying "Move it up, down, bigger, smaller" and me saying "Grrr".

The classic photo belows shows the "mapping office" scene that reappears in one form or another before each trip.  

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