2020: Planning a Bucket List Tour Route

My tour this summer from Carmel, Indiana to Lansing Michigan was unique in many ways. A bucket list tour that included stops at my high school and parent’s farm, I was not riding to a typical bicycle tour destination, so there were not many routes available. Touring in the middle of COVID, this was not the time to try Warm Showers, or approaching someone for freestyle camping in a backyard. While I knew from experience there would be no shortage of great back road miles, I still had to find my way to campgrounds, or at least a Plan B motel. On my 2014 tour, along the Katy Trail and across Illinois,  the first time I had tried internet route planning, I had learned a few of the tricks, and a few of the pitfalls. So here is I how I pulled all this together for navigating my tour this summer.

My itinerary on Google Maps

To start planning, I have a couple of rules of thumb that I use as guides. First, every hour by car to reach a destination is the equivalent of a day of bicycle touring. This is especially true if you are camp touring. My other planning guide is “10 miles per hour on the road”: this is not about your speed, this is how fast you are moving toward you destination, after you figure in everything that makes up touring; map checks, finding a grocery or restaurant, topping off water bottles, and a dozen other bits of minutia through out each day on the road. I have had faster days and stretches riding but I have also had 2 flats in 10 miles on the Katy Trail, or a day of 25 mph headwinds in Michigan’s UP. Both of these guides, gained by experience have served me well over many years.

With the above in mind, I had to look at the days available to get to my destination, with one last consideration before I could build my itinerary. My time available only allowed a one-way tour, and I planned to rent a mid-size car for the drive home. This meant I had to have my end point reasonable close to an available car rental pickup. In my case, that meant a mid-sized airport with weekend rental hours. But this also meant I had include an extra day of travel from my rural “bucket” list destination.

Matching this up with my available vacation time, I had 5 riding days, and a drive home day. My rental car pickup would be near the home of friends (and my final overnight), was about 5 hour driving time from home. With all my tour parameters complete, I opened up Google maps, selected the Bicycle option, and started mapping out my overnight destinations. Google maps allows you to create multiple destination routes, and you can take two approaches. You can put in your start and end points, and then insert the waypoints, of just keep adding destinations to the end for each leg. I use the additive approach, and I linked in the first campgrounds I was sure of, and then starting scanning the map between there and my fourth night campground. I then settled on my second night, and I had 150 miles complete with 120 to cover to night four.

Adding destinations builds your route.

To find night three, I starting looking in the overlap of two 70 mile arcs from my day 2 overnight and my day 4 overnight. This covered south central Michigan and the northwest corner of Ohio. Then I began checking the towns for any nearby campgrounds. While I would have liked crossing a third state line, none of the available Ohio campgrounds offered showers or a laundry option, so I settled on a private Michigan campground, with both, on the north west end of my search area. With all my overnights set, I was ready to enter the destinations for days 4 and 5 into Google maps. Next I saved saved a link of the entire route, and copied it into an Apple Notes document.  Apple Notes automatically synched this to my iPhone and iPad. At the same time, I also created another Notes document with a list of my overnights and all their contact information, my reservation numbers, and my car rental reservation as well.

One thing I opted not to do was load the route into my Wahoo Bolt GPS. I reserved my Bolt for simply recording my route and stats, and relied on my iPhone for navigating. I knew my route as researched was intended be a general guide, and I would adjusting on the fly for road conditions, or finding an open cafe with WiFi. While the Bolt’s navigation is very good, I wanted the flexibility for changes without my Bolt lecturing me, and I this would also optimize its battery life.

At the start of each day on the road, I would open my Notes app to the saved Google maps link, and then find my location on the map. I would continue to reference the map as needed as the day progressed. I soon realized I could also utilize Apple Map’s Siri Navigation. By choosing towns 10 to 15 miles ahead ahead on my intended route, I could let Siri call out my next turn. Since I ride with a handlebar bag, the iPhone was within ear shot and and easy reach, and my Watch was giving turn prompts as well. And with a battery pack dedicated to keeping my iPhone charged (a lesson I learned on an earlier tour), that was not a worry either.

For the most part my plan worked very well for this trip. I only encountered a few navigation issues. Both were with my State Parks. In one case, the address I entered entered was for the recreation area office, and not the actual campground, and that added 5 miles at the end of the day. And in another case, while I had the correct address for the park, the campground was actually 3 1/2 miles from the gatehouse. Not a big deal when you are driving, but a little bit more of a surprise for a touring cyclist. That day was typical, with Google showing a 67 mile route, but the miles in and out of campgrounds, and grocery and lunch side trips, my final for the day was 75 miles. All told, my various adjustments added about 5-7 miles a day to the trip, but well within my expectations; I was fortunate this trip to not have any 20 mile mis-adventures to end the day!

Google predicted 67, your mileage may vary!

As for bike route choices, Google seems to have tendency to use state and US highways when there is a paved shoulder, rather than using a parallel secondary road. This worked fine for a quiet state route in northern Indiana, where a combination of rivers and lakes did not leave a good back roads route to my next overnight. Later in Michigan, Google picked a US highway with a paved shoulder that I knew to have heavy truck traffic. In this case the Google bicycle route algorithm apparently did this to avoid 8 miles of gravel; however, I now tour on a bike at home on gravel, and I enjoyed the more direct backroad riding.

My tour planning has come a long way from winging it with state highway maps, and sending letters to bike clubs and highway departments months in advance. Less than 10 miles from our current home is stretch of State Highway that Linda were attempting to ride in the afternoon rush hour, many years ago, and we had no idea were any of the side roads we encountered might lead as we waited for the traffic to quiet. Today, you can pull over, pull up a satellite image, and check out all the options. You still want to research, and be ready for Plan B, but don’t have to ride in the dark.

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