Resources for Designing Your European Bicycle Tour Route #3 - Books

Our first post introduced the Eurovelo long distance bicycle touring network in Europe and our second post introduced you to critical maps to help you design your tour route. This post deals with resource books - both the good, the bad and the mediocre.

There are 3 Kinds of Bicycle Touring Books

1) Bicycle touring narratives;
2) "How to" books: how to pack, how to camp, how to cook, and more.
3) Bicycle tour route books: there are a small number of really great books in this category. There are lots of terrible books that fit here.

Bicycle Touring Narratives

There are a few classic bicycle touring narratives out there. You should read them, not because they'll help you prepare for your trip, but because they are great travel literature and they'll help get you psyched for your trip. The definitive bibliography of this literature is an ongoing project of Dr. Duncan Jamieson, a history professor at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio. You can see his bibliography here.

But here are a few classic volumes that you might want to peruse:

Barbara Savage, Miles from Nowhere: A Round the World Bicycle Adventure (Paperback), first published by the Mountaineers in 1985. A great narrative of a two-year round-the-world bicycle tour by Savage and her husband. Tragically, the author was killed in a bike/car crash in California right before the book was published.

Andrew X. Pham, Catfish & Mandala, A vietnamese Odyssey (Flamingo/HarperCollins, 2000 and 2001); a memoir by a Vietnamese American who returns to Vietnam by bicycle to find himself. A real adventure in all senses of the word.

Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (first published in 1965). If you don't know Dervla Murphy, this is a great way to start.

Mark Jenkins, Off the Map, Bicycling Across Siberia, (William Morrow and Company, 1992) a great adventure of pedaling across Siberia right after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"How to" bicycle touring books

We're not fans of "how to books." We just don't think that there is nearly as much to be gained from reading something called The Essential Touring Cyclist: A Complete Guide for the Bicycle Traveler as there is in reading some of the more entertaining travel literature cited above. Take a look on Amazon, though, and surf the web. You may find something that strikes your fancy. The following category has more to offer for your planning.

Bicycle Touring Route Books

Watch out! Some of these are great, most are just reruns of "how I spent my summer bicycling across Italy."

Seriously, most bicycle touring books that purport to tell you about bicycling in Italy, France, or wherever, are just a narrative of a ride somebody took. The problem with this kind of book is that they took one ride across Italy, Tuscany, or wherever and wrote it up. That makes them an expert? If I were you I'd want to know the BEST route across Italy or France, not the one John Doe took.

Good route books:
A couple of series of books are quite good, but be careful. The Lonely Planet Cycling Guide Series is pretty good but only if you get the second or later editon! First editions are often no better than Joe Blow bicycling someplace once and writing it up. So scout Amazon.com, for example for anything but the first edition of Cycling Britain, Cycling Italy, and so on.

One great series, and we can hope other series will come out, are the German BikeLine
route guides. These guides combine detailed maps for an entire route along with a step-by-step guide. The focus on some of the classic routes in Europe: Down the Danube, the Moselle, the Rhine, and other river rides.

Some of the Bikeline guides are available in English (the Danube for sure) if you can find them. Otherwise, its worth ordering the German version and using it just for the maps.

You can find the publisher's web site by clicking here. If they cover your region or the area you are headed to, this is your book series.

Resources for Designing Your European Bicycle Tour Route #2 - Maps

Our first post introduced the Eurovelo long distance bicycle touring network in Europe. Click on "route design" in the margin and you'll get all the posts relative to designing your route.

This post talks a little about basic maps for your trip: which maps to use and which to avoid, where to find the right maps, specialty maps, and so on. Later I'll talk about your basic bicycle touring books and why they aren't all that good. Then we'll begin to steer you toward two really valuable resources: 1) interactive online resources for bike route design; and, 2) newer edition publications that combine route notes and maps (available only in very popular bike touring areas).

We often see cyclists pedaling down a busy highway in Italy with a 1:1,000,000 Michelin map of Italy. No wonder that cyclist is on the wrong road. Michelin is French and their Italian maps aren't very good. Plus, the scale of one to a million is way too small (small scale, small detail; large scale, large detail).

For Europe, generally speaking, you want a map at about a 1:200,000 scale. You can get larger scale maps (1:100,000 or even 1:25,000) but to go anywhere on a bike you'd need a pannier full of these maps.

With that scale map you can cover most of a region and with two or three you can get across France, most of Italy, and so on.

Key Maps in A Few Countries of Europe

France: Michelin; regional maps at a scale of 1:200,000
Germany: The German Bicycle Touring Club (ADFC : Allgemeiner Deutsche Fahrrad Club) produces an excellent series of bicycle maps at 1:150,000
Italy: Italian Touring Club (Touring Club Italiano, TCI); regional at 1:200,000 (shown on this post)
(Michelin makes maps of Italy at 1:400,000 but they aren't detailed enough)
Ireland: Ordinance Survey Maps (Irish Government); 1:250,000 (you can cover the whole Republic in three maps; add Northern Ireland with a fourth
Spain: Instituto Geografico Nacional (Spanish Government mapping office) makes a great series by Province (Mapa Provincial) at 1:200,000 (find them in local bookstores or tobacconist shops)
Greece: Greece is tough but DON'T rely on foreign maps; I like Road Editions, 1:250,000 covering the entire country in 6 maps.
England, Scotland, Wales: Ordinance Survey 1:250,000 maps cover the entire United Kingdom (these are the maps generally recommended by the premier British bicycle touring organization, the Cyclists Tour Club - the CTC)

In the USA, of course, you'll be looking at the materials produced by the Adventure Cycling Association.

Later we'll talk about even more valuable resources and other maps. But don't forget the fun part of getting a paper map and poring over it to design your route!

Designing Your European Bicycle Tour Route #1 - Eurovelo

So, you're headed off to do a bike tour of Europe and you'd like to begin designing your route. Indeed, that's half the fun! This post will give you a few ideas and resources on how to start.

The Eurovelo Bike Route System as a Place to Begin

The adjacent map shows you a sketch of the Eurovelo bike route system. This long distance route network is briefly described in Wikipedia. But take a look at their web site for a comprehensive perspective.

At completion the Eurovelo network will identify and mark 12 long distance routes throughout Europe. Route number 6, for example follows the Loire River through France, then heads through a corner of Switzerland and into Germany where it picks up the Danube River which you follow all the way to the Black Sea. The great thing about these routes is that you can select a portion and follow it only in France, for example.

Route 6 is currently marked on the ground from Nantes, France as far as Budapest. About a six-week ride. But if you are just interested in a France, German or Austrian portion, it would do fine. The Eurovelo Route 6 website is here.

The web site description isn't comprehensive, though, so you'll need maps to complete your planning. Stay tuned for the next post on the best maps to use for your planning. We'll use the Loire River in France as an example.