We have now done enough tours that our equipment list has settled down. Most issues about what is good or not or how much to take have been resolved. So we are more focussed now on where to go and what to look at, than on how to do it. (On the other hand, we do have the loomiing issue coming up: can we do it.)

Still there seems to be five or so pieces of equipment, or services, that still seem to merit some comment. So here are those comments. We'll start with just one or two, and add the rest soon.

Flexlite Chairs

It was a couple of years ago now that Trish Graham tipped us off to the benefits of bringing some sort of chair to Europe. Unlike in North America, most campgrounds in Europe can not be relied on to provide anything more than a patch of grass. Young people do not seem to mind this, and we have often seen people happily sitting cross legged on the ground, heating their tea or fryng up and eating a full meal down there. But, that is not for us now. In fact, it never was.

So, despite the weight, we started out carry three legged stools. These are a big advance from sitting on the ground, but we did find that after 20 minutes or so they begin to conflict with your delicate underside parts. We put up with this, until this year we made the leap to the four legged variety of chair.

Probably the best known of these chairs is the one from Helinox. But REI in the U.S. had one that was lighter and cheaper, called the Flexlite. These are the ones we took this time.

We found that we could not be happier with the Flexlite. They are relatively light, easy to assemble, and reasonably stable on the ground. What's more, I just like the feel of thier materials - from the poles and fittings to the chair back and bag, it all feels high quality to me.

There is a chance that we will mostly or completely give up on camping next time around. But we still think we will take the Flexlites. When there is no bench for lunch, or when you just need a break, they can turn almost any patch of ground into a temporary home.

Booking.com

Booking and using hotels is a new topic for us, and kind of a painful one. Not long ago, our image of a touring cyclist included mandatory low rider front packs. This was essential so that the profile of an approaching rider would be that of some little legs thrashing up and down amid a suitably large pile of bags. The only reason for having so many bags would in turn be the need to contain tent, sleeping bag, and cooking gear.

This is what we looked like when we crossed Canada, and when we showed up in Europe, we were set up the same. We could not help noticing, though, that the overwhelming majority of European cyclists had only two rear bags. What they were doing was zipping from Guesthouse to Guesthouse. How lame, what weenies, we snorted.

But slowly we found out that the Guesthouse industry was thickly spread over the continent, and camping - not so much. Plus the guesthouses were super comfortable, and almost always bike friendly. So it began to be that rather than bust our guts to find and get to the one camping in a place, we would choose one of many great guesthouses. Yes, the nightly cost was about triple that of camping, but we also found (particularly in Germany) that the included breakfast buffet cut down our food costs a lot, and narrowed the gap.

That, however, was the slippery slope. We got used to guesthouses/hotels and started to count on them. We moved from "hey, look at that neat place - why not stop here", to "we are headed to town X and we want to find a good and cheap place before we get there". So that's how we landed in the arms of Booking.com.

Booking.com is one of at least ten online booking sites (Travelocity, Expedia, Hotwire, Priceline, Orbitz, Hotels, ...). As far as we can make out, their game is to grab up a certain number of rooms from participating hotels and attempt to sell them through their site. Depending on how things are going, they may or may not offer rooms at lower prices than the hotel itself is charging for the same room types that have not been bound over to the booking company.

If we are right about this being the way things are organized, then the key fact is that unlike a Google searching, a booking site search does not attempt to dig up info on any and all accommodation out there. Rather, you just get told about the hotels that have a deal with the booking site. Sometimes that excludes cheaper places (who may not feel like paying a commission/selling rooms to the site at a discount) but to be fair, we have also seen quite a few really cheap places listed.

One other implications of our theory of what these sites are, is that your may have checked a booking site price for a given hotel, but not booked, but then become a walk-in. The price asked might then be higher than what you saw online. If you say "Hey, that was 5 euros cheaper on Booking" you may be invited to sit down and book it online from the lobby, or they may cave and just give you the lower price.

To us, the really critical issue about booking sites is the entent to which they really have a good selection in any given place. Coverage will vary by country and region, but we got the impression from talking to hotels in Europe that Booking.com is their main thing. Priceline, though, seems to have a good presence, and then there is Venere.com, which is supposed to specialize in Europe. I think I read somewhere that Expedia bought Venere and merged databases, but I might be dreaming or garbling that story.

Beyond the database, or stable of partner properties, the next most critical thing for us is the search interface. You need to be able to sort and filter results effectively, or you may be lost in a welter of miscellaneous listings. Also critical is the map. On a bike, a site that thinks 20 km away is still in the place you asked about is useless. But even 5 km away from city centre and still 20 km off your route (because of being on the "wrong" side of town) is also useless. So the ability to effectively map the selections is critical. This become s double critical when you are actually trying to find the place.

We have found that the Booking Android app is very good at sorting, filtering, and mapping. Surprisingly, it is better with the mapping than the full website. By the way, if you look at the interfaces of various booking outfits, you will quickly see that some are identical, giving strong evidence that different company names are actually all the same thing.

There are some online sources that claim to have evaluated the various booking sites. They typically use ten or more criteria, but these can be things like the quality of the hotel description or whether they can also book you a car. Have a look at "hotel-booking-services-review.toptenreviews.com" if you like.

An interesting extension of the booking thing is Trivago, which purports to scan the other booking sites and find all the available rooms on them, plus the best prices from among them. Our finding in Europe was that Trivago most commonly mentioned Booking, and that when others were involved, often Priceline, the prices were the same. Trivago has good sort and filter facilities, but when you finally settle on a place to book, it transfers you to the website of the booking service you are really going with. This brings me to the last point:

Unless you are doing all this from a fast computer with good internet, you have to think about how the services fare on a "toy" tablet or phone, with either weak wifi or a slow 3G connection. So doing the whole thing on Trivago and only then getting transferred to some other site did not work for us. Also, on our older tablet. touching the Booking icon results at first in absolutely nothing happening. Then after an inordinate delay, Booking comes up, with screens that force you to do other screen taps. A common behaviour after one of these taps is for the screen to go totally and frighteningly black, for too long, before the app comes back with the next screen. It is not nearly this bad on newer faster devices and with faster internet. But it had us seriously looking at a newer tablet and faster internet arrangements. So when I say this whole hotel thing is triple expensive, make that a low end guess!

Osmand GPS App

We would guess that every cycle tourist today is packing some sort of GPS application. It is necessary, because even the best maps not always do the trick, since they can not tell you where you are at any moment. And even the best signed routes are never 100%, plus miss a sign and you are lost!

In the past the standard for GPS would be a dedicated, usually Garmin, GPS unit. These had the advantage of waterproofness, and long battery life. But we found the screens small and difficult to make out, and we ran in to other problems, such as with the Garmin 800. We even posted a Crazyguy article about that one!

So that brings us to smartphones and GPS apps. The big problem with this had been the lack of waterproofness, handlebar mounting, and battery life. The first two problems got solved by the advent of completely waterproof mounts, which are specific to smartphone models. We are using the Tigra BikeConsole for our Galaxy S3. The problem of battery life is solved by using Samsung, (but not the attrocious S6) where swapping in a new battery is a matter of fifteen seconds. Otherwise there is now a good selection of external battery packs available. If you charge one of these the night before, you can hàve plenty of juice for a day of not being lost.

In terms of apps we live in the Android world, but we have lately heard excellent reports about Galileo for Apple. For Android, we checked out a half dozen systems last year , and can no longer remember the details, after settling on Osmand+. Osmand + uses Open Street Map/Open Cycle Map. Consequently there is no charge for downloaded maps, and the app can find routes using cycle paths.

Despite the ability to plot cycling ways, and even to speak the route turn by turn, Dodie refuses to put any faith in the function. This is probably a good idea, since a program may readily dump you onto a busy road or big hill. Osmand also has a tendency to choke if asked for any kind of a long route at all.

Osmand has other weaknesses too. Unlike with Google Maps, you can not just mention a place or a restaurant or something, and have it glom on to what you are talking about. Rather there are some quite formal menus to go through. In fact, a sort of simple inquiry, like how to get from Chicago to Detroit would probably result in a half hour of entertaining fooling around, even for an experienced user.

(Just to amplify this point, for anyone who cares: To get a route from (as an example) Tours to Nantes, with Google Maps I just called up the "directions" box and put in Tours and Nantes. It recognized exactly what I meant by these places and gave a 212 km bike routing immediately, even over 3G. By contrast, the procedure with Osmand is first to clear any previous destinations and/or stop any previous navigations. Then you have to (search) for (addresses) and you need to know that Nantes is in the region Pays de la Loire. Then Osmand may know what you are talking about. If not, you have to ask for (search villages). Once Osmand would have somehow found Nantes, you have to (set destination) for Nantes.

Next step would be to touch the map somewhere near Tours (assuming that this is not your current location), then touch the box which pops up and finally choose (directions from) Then (on my tablet) 2 minutes later you will get a blue line (but no turn my turn description) for a route of 196 km.

Gads!

Where Osmand does excel is in firing up premade gpx files, and showing the contained route as a blue track. Combined with the blue dot that shows current position (blue arrow, if you are moving) it is a powerful tool for staying on track.So our most classic use would be to download the gpx for a Bikeline route, and then use the GPS plus the Bikeline map to never (almost never) get lost. This is a big change from a past year, where we named the blog Grampies Go in Circles, for very good reasons.

p.s. Osmand also has a search function that purports to show accommodation, camping, and lots of other services. This is uincomplete, and the coding as to what things are is flaky. e.g. Why would they have a category called "for tourists" and what weird stuff they put in there! However, even though we can never rely on Osmand search, it often seems to turn up useful things - like camping that Bikeline did not know about or a hotel that Booking did not list. One of the advantages of something that Osmand does list is that it can show you it directly on the map. If you happen to trust the routing function, it can also take you to the door.

DaBrim Helmet Visors

Lots of people (including ourselves) ave already written positive comments about the DaBrim line of visors, that slip over your helmet and protrect from sun in front and rain down the back. So this is just a small addendum. As we travel around we attract lots of questions about what we are doing and how we are doing it. Before this year, the majority of questions seemed triggered by our heavily laden little bikes. But this year, though the bikes still are of interest, it is the DaBrims that seemed to attract the most attention. Often this would take the form of people calling out the equivalent of "Like your hat" as they passed us, either by bike or in cars, or standing by the path. So many times, we took off our helmets to show people the hard (for Europeans) to grasp name, and to advise them to go look at dabrim.com if they would like to buy some.

An interesting sidelight is that this interest was most intense in Germany, less in France, and nil in Italy. Probably this corresponds to the popularity of cycle touring (as opposed to lycra racing) in these three countries.