GoGeezGo : Planning a bicycle tour

Adventure Cycling Association map

The fun part about bike touring is the riding.

Planning is less jolly.

But figuring out where to go, how to get from point A to B, where to sleep and get water and other supplies is critical to the success of any touring adventure.

The easiest but most expensive solution is to book a guided tour and leave the planning to others.

To take charge of your own trip, you will have have to do at least some research, whether carrying all of your own gear on your bike or using a support vehicle to transport cargo.

A great place to start is the Adventure Cycling Association, because the Missoula, MT-based organization has done a lot of the requisite research for the 48,608 miles of bike-friendly routes it has mapped in North America.

The ACA maps identify a route’s campgrounds, motels, grocery stores, bicycle shops, post offices and elevation profiles. The post office information is useful for mailing resupply packages. Elevation is good to know when estimating how far to try to ride on a particular day.

The maps also provide turn-by-turn directions for the routes. Since the turns on ACA paper maps are marked by mileage, cyclists need accurately calibrated cyclometers to stay on track with them.

When using ACA’s paper maps, call ahead to make sure that any businesses you are relying on are still in operation, and check the association’s web site for updates and corrections.

The association also sells digital versions of its maps as GPX data that work on a user’s GPS device or smartphone. Digital map information can also be acquired through an ACA smartphone app.

During a weeklong tour of a section of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route earlier this year, I used all three technologies, but found that I relied mostly on the turn-by-turn cue sheets included in the ACA paper maps and GPX data that I downloaded to my Garmin eTrex 20x.

I used the GPX track for the Tour Divide bike race on the eTrex. The Tour Divide, an annual endurance bike contest, mostly follows the GDMBR from Banff, Canada, to Antelope Wells, N.M. The Tour Divide GPX track is available free at topofusion.com.

I thought both the eTrex GPX and the ACA smartphone app tracks were extremely helpful and made navigating and staying on route easy. But the eTrex ran for several days on two replaceable AA batteries while the ACA app drained my iPhone battery within five or six hours.

The eTrex has also proved to be less susceptible to the cold than my smartphone. My smartphone literally freezes and stops working whenever it gets chilly. My eTrex has yet to fail for weather-related reasons. But the vulnerabilities of the smartphone underscore why it’s a good idea to carry a paper map and compass to back up the electronic navigational devices.

When searching for bike-friendly routes over paved roads, I’ve had fairly good luck using the cycling option on the Google Maps smartphone app.

If you are planning to ship your bike at the beginning and/or end of your tour, a great resource is bikeflights.com. The company specializes in arranging bike shipments and may be able to get you better deals through UPS or Federal Express than you can. The website provides instructions on how to pack your bike yourself, if you want to economize. You can buy a hard or soft shipping case, or simply get a used shipping box from your local bike shop. The website also provides a list of bike shops that will pack and ship or receive and reassemble your bike for a fee.

For my mini-tour of the Great Divide, I used bikeflights.com to ship my bike to the Whitefish Bike Retreat. The retreat, a hostel and camping facility for mountain bikers and bike-packers outside the town of Whitefish, MT, holds bikes for guests for free. I reassembled my bike in the retreat’s shop. My friend Dave and I also booked space on the retreat’s shuttle to start our GDMBR ride at the U.S./Canada border.

Other great resources for researching bike routes are the journals on crazyguyonabike.com.

I read several while researching my GDMBR ride, including this one:

https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?o=1mr&doc_id=18096&v=17o.

Still another great resource for planning a GDMBR ride is Michael McCoy’s, Cycling the Great Divide https://www.amazon.com/Cycling-Great-Divide-Americas-Long-Distance/dp/1594858195. The book provides a lot of great information about the route and suggests an itinerary. I downloaded the McCoy book to my iPhone and read the relevant sections daily to help plan each day’s ride.