Originally Posted by
dstke
Thought I'd throw in my 2 cents after having researched this a bit. My wife and I are planning a trip around the Alps this summer. I bought a Garmin Edge 800 and started to look into route planning tools. First I bought all the maps I needed. I checked out
MapMyRide and
BikeMap.net. Both are good for showing rides but not necessarily for routing.
Bikeroutetoaster.com and
VeloMaps.org (from where you can download
OpenCycleMaps and use a route planner like Mapsource) seemed like they would do the trick but in comparing them with a route that we took years ago (Prague - Budapest) they were not routing along known cycling routes. Best I've been able to find so far is
OpenRouteService.org and
Yournavigation.org. Both interfaces are a bit limited and I'm surprised that they don't show the underlying cycling routes from OpenCycleMaps on which they're based, but they seem to work.
Your Velo link redirects to
http://veloroutes.org/.
I just downloaded an all-Europe cycling map from
http://www.velomap.org/, an open source bicycle map compiler. To get maps for all of Europe, a painless 20 Euro "donation" is required. These maps are designed to be used with the Garmin 800, and come in two versions, one optimized for display in BaseCamp, and another version optimized for display in an 800. Much better IMO than those expensive maps available from Garmin.
I've been planning a tour in the Czech Republic and Germany, using Czech online maps, so I'm already familiar with cyclotrasy in the CR. It looks to me like these maps have very good representations of cycling routes and are designed to route the user along these tracks rather than on roads. So looks good to me and worth the small donation.
For creating tracks to follow in advance of the trip, I've found bikely.com to have the best interface. I download a gpx from there, then upload and massage it in bikeroutetoaster before downloading and then uploading a TCX track into BaseCamp and thence onto the Garmin. I have an 8GB SD card to hold the maps, TCX routes, and the Garmin created tracks and data. Although I'm using bikely.com to plot the routes, inside the Czech Republic I'm plotting them along the cycling routes (cyclotrasy) shown in the velomap.org Garmin maps but along roads in Germany. So far, this is working very well. The downloading and uploading business sounds much more arduous than it is.
Because we'll be camping as much as possible, I've set up an inexpensive external battery for the 800:
Battery holder:
http://www.batteryspace.com/batteryh...compliant.aspx
Batteries:
http://www.thomasdistributing.com/16...ml?frontpage=1
Battery charger:
http://www.thomasdistributing.com/Ma...del_p_381.html
Unlike previous Garmins, the 800 can be plugged into a battery while in navigation mode. It should run 40-50 hours on this combination of internal and external batteries.
Since we'll be touring on a tandem, Stoker will have the 800 and navigation chores, freeing Captain to watch the road!
We'll also carry a couple of paper maps. I'll also create paper cue sheets from the bikely.com routes, so if the Garmin has a major problem we'll still have our routes. The cue sheets for a 3 week tour will be about 1/2" X 5" X 5" and weigh maybe an ounce.