Route Planning

Being a conservative type, I spent hours pouring over the Map My Ride website to come up with a route. The result was a set of maps giving distance and information on climbs, this allowed me to decide upon how the route should be tackled from day to day. The route involves a lot of A roads but some of the roads take you through the wilderness, especially in Cumbria and the Highlands.

I’m sure the routes could have been added to a GPS system; I’d considered this but then went with chopping up a couple of road atlases, doing the manual ‘cut and paste’ and marking the route with a highlighter. The old school approach meant no dead batteries and no satellite drop out; it worked very well.

Feel free to have a look at the maps, I’d love to hear your comments about the route in detail or as a whole.

A word on ‘waterproof’ map covers.

Unless you pay a lot for something Ortleib have produced, most cases with a seam will allow water in over time. Soggy maps are very hard to read and could ruin your day. I put the maps in a food grade plastic bag, rolled it’s top down (Ortleib style) and put this in the map case. This low tech and cheap solution seemed to work. The maps that had been used or were not required until later in the ride were nicely waterproofed in my panniers.