Bike Routes Galore
Our thinking about bike routing is almost entirely centred around named and mapped bikeways. Part of it is that we hate getting stuck on narrow roads, where we end up riding the right hand white line, if there even is one. But the other part is the "romance" of the named route. Ones like the Veloscenie and Velodysee in France, or the Romantische Strasse in Germany or Claudia Augusta in Germany, Austria, and Italy just sound like amusement rides, fun destination activities for cycling fans. And as soon as we learn of a new one (to us), we immediately want to go on it.
For this trip there are some golden oldies that we plan to follow again, and then there are some new ones.
Before making our choice we naturally checked the website of the German publisher Esterbauer. Esterbauer puts out the most amazing range of cycling guides, all under the non German sounding brand name "Bikeline". A typical Bikeline route covers 300-500 km and features mapping usually at the very detailed 1:50,000 scale, all designed to fit a handlebar bag map case. How many Bikeline routes there are is hard to say, but a search on Amazon.de yields more than 1,000!
Bikeline focuses on Germany, but also covers Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, France, Denmark, Spain, Italy, and even one book for New Zealand.
We are obviously not familiar with all the existing 1000+ routes, but it is still fun to look at the new ones. Have a look, don't you want to get going on one??
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Bikeline of course is not the only purveyor of European routes. In terms of books there is also Chamina, France West, ADFC (the German cycling club), and more. To boot, there are many websites - many put out by regions, like Provence, and many more general ones. For example, there is one called Europafietsers out of Netherlands. They focus on routes that start in that country, but they cover dozens. Just look at (part of) their live map. Each one of those lines lights up when you mouse over it, and then you can get maps and tracks for it!
Getting books for the routes can look something like this:
All this is of course part of why we love coming to Europe to cycle, and why we can not see an end to the number of trips we could do there. But it is also mind boggling, and while the routes look good you are never sure about what they are really like until you try. That's why we would not lay our usual 4000-5000 km for a three month trip all on new routes.
In fact this time around you could say we are being very timid. We have chosen sixteen mostly named routes that will effectively circle France. Of these we can only say of five that they are totally new to us. In the next page we have a quick look at the top three of those, to see what is hopefully so great about them. But as the tour goes along we will try to name, describe, and map the routes as we begin them.
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Thank you.
PS. You also mentioned that one to us : https://www.biroto.eu/en/
which is great too.
6 years ago