I discovered the http://www.mycycletour.com site recently while looking around for things to put on my site. It was launched in Jan, 2013 and is similar to other mapping sites like mapmyride.com, etc, though it appears to be specifically designed for bike touring. It is a good idea, in that it automatically calculates an elevation chart and a difficulty rating from 1 to 10 and lets you post photos of your ride afterward. The site is slick looking, uses Google's mapping interface and also offers the street-view feature. It is clear that someone has put some serious time and (likely) money into this project and I wish them well.

But it has a serious shortcoming that I discovered in the first minute of entering my first route.

The main problem is caused by the underlying system design that you enter a starting and ending point for your tour and it then creates a route for you. While this isn't a problem in and of itself, it is a non-starter if you are trying to ride a loop tour. I tried to create a map for my upcoming loop tour in SW Texas but got nothing. The only way to create such a route is to create an ending point along your intended route, clicking to creating waypoints (you get 8) where you actually want to ride and then moving the ending point to another place along your route. This has to be repeated until the route gets back to the starting point.

Frankly, this is enough of a bother that I'd rather stick with one of the existing sites where you click on the map to generate the route and then you mark the end when you get there. This is how mapmyride.com works. Also, only 8 waypoints, which are needed to make changes in the calculated route, would likely be a serious shortcoming to anyone trying to create a route of any length. One way around this limitation is to "link" routes together, which the system allows.

That said, it is a very nice looking system that is good for point to point routes and may, sometime in the future, have lots of routes that would be a good place to search for touring ideas. The route I created was number 29.