UK to Berlin
 

Hi, Im new to this forum but was wondering if anyone has cycled Calais to Berlin, or knows any good routes through these areas. Apparantly there are bike tracks all over europe called eurovelos but I cant find any site that tells me where they actually go, or where they start and end. I want to avoid main roads for saftey reasons and Im gonna give myself about 18 days to do it in, leaving at the beggining of July. Any help from anyone would be much appreciated as the only thing ive got to go on at the moment are really large scale road maps.
Thanks!

http://www.ecf.com/14_1 - you can buy German/English route guides here. You'll be wanting Route 2, I guess.

I've done Hook of Holland to Cologne - generally the route was very clearly marked, only a couple of misroutes (I accidentally found myself in Belgium at one point!). If you had a hiking GPS pre-set with the waypoints it would be very easy.

One thing that's odd - very surprised that Eurovelo doesn't have everything on a Google Map and with a full pack of downloadable waypoints. They're surely not attempting to protect their map sales are they?

I look for this too. I searched a lot and found interesting results.

For example, exactly from Calais to Berlin there is the Euroroute R1:
http://www.euroroute-r1.de/EN/Introd...te_R1/K407.htm

I did it from Wittemberg to Berlin in my bicycle tour of 2009 and it was a wonderful way inside the forests!

I find eurovelo incredibly frustrating. It is a great idea but finding details of where the routes go and whether they have been fully established, signposted etc is very difficult. The website isn't really much help.

From what I understand it started with vague ideas of possible routes and then establishing those routes was left to national organisations. Hence the results are patchy. There doesn't seem to be a good resource detailing which routes are usable.

It would be really good if the routes that do exist could be added to the opencyclemap project http://www.opencyclemap.org/ but that hasn't been done yet. Then the routes could simply be copied onto normal maps.

I agree, planning a tour in Eurovelo maps gives enthusiasm at first, but then you see relity is different.

However, the Euroroute R1 is not an abstract Eurovelo line. It's a real route, with real metal signs along the way. And the part I did was almost all along traffic-free routes, and it had also small wooden houses in stop areas [not so clean, in reality...] which you could use as a refuge!

I add the R1 map:
http://www.euroroute-r1.de/_obj/D682...arte_int-2.gif

Almost exactly from Calais to Berlin :)

This is the map book you want. The text may be in German, but the maps in the book are crystal clear and self-explanatory: http://www.esterbauer.com/db_rtb_det...uecher_code=R1

:)