I like to do a lot of planning for my bike tours. One reason is that I make extensive use of hospitality hosts and want to give them as much advanced notice as I can. I also find the act of planning bike tours somewhat fun.
In March, 2011, I added
tour planning pages to my website that allows anyone willing to take the time to create a free login to create tour plans that are a combination of web links, packing list, travel information, and other details. These plans can be kept private or made public for others to benefit from. In addition, specific sections of a plan can be set to private to keep something out of the public view, such as travel plans (which can't be made public) or names of potential hosts.
For me, the most important part of planning is devising a reasonable itinerary so that I have some idea where I'll be on a given night to try and find hosts. In the past, I simply listed the itinerary along with the other details on the page, usually in the Route section. But, I always wanted a more capable itinerary system than simply entering text lines.
To remedy this, I created an Itineray section to the tour planning page that allows someone to list a day's starting place, ending place, distance, and a comment. One added benefit is that the starting and ending locations are indexed into the site's database so that anyone searching for that location can find, in addition to links and journal pages, touring plans assocatied with it, as well.
If you'd like to see what this looks like in a public touring plan, you can check my most recent
touring plan for my upcoming tour of Big Bend National Park. Go to this page if you'd like to play with
creating your own touring plans. Remember that you can't create a touring plan until you have a site login (
free registration here), which you can get here.