Your system works because your tours are evidently limited in nature and you do extensive pre-trip planning and you seldom or never deviate from your meticulously planned route. Many people plan their tours on the fly and a small GPS device will be cumbersome for this compared to a paper map. Even a full-size computer display is cumbersome for planning purposes compared to paper maps. Also, your routes are evidently either very complicated or you lack short-term memory and you are fascinated by the idea of never losing a minute of precious time by having to stop at an intersection to check which way to go. You also don't apparently have to make a tradeoff (money or weight) with regards to how many electronic gizmos and spare AA batteries you will be carrying on a long tour. In other words, you are quite different from the sort of bike tourists I'm more familiar with.

Where GPS (mapping or non-mapping) really shines is for hikers going cross-country in featureless but rugged terrain, where topo maps plus compass are next to useless for finding position, especially when deviating from the desired route is dangerous, such as due to the need to cross a river at a particular spot where it is known to be shallow. For traveling cross-country on terrain obscured by snow, in particular, whether on foot, skies or snowmobile, GPS is a god-send. Bike tourists (this is the BIKE TOURING forum) almost never encounter situations like this.

Wow. Aren't we a bit hostile --on a personal basis, no less? You continue to criticize and attack something you've never tried. I love paper maps and frequently dig them out at lunch stops and day's end. You apparently have a problem being open-minded. That would be a detriment on bike tour, I suspect.

I'm not sure why you think topo maps are useless on rugged terrain, I guess in the days before GPS no one ever dared to venture into rugged terrain...right?

I said rugged and featureless but with the need to stay on a particular course. Featureless (no mountains or mountains hidden by trees or covered by clouds or obscured by fog) means you can't triangulate very well with the compass and rugged means you can't hold a straight line, so you are very likely to walk in circles. Furthermore, the ruggedness may not be evident on the map. A 10 foot cliff, for example, is a difficult obstacle, but doesn't show up on topo maps. Karst country is full of such cliffs. In swampy areas, the natural tendency is to stick to the dry ground, but that may take you way off course, and you may have a devil of a time getting back on course, especially if the trail is not well-marked. Snow travel is another classic case where topo maps are next to useless. Bike tourists seldom or never encounter these situations though backpackers do.

Obviously, people got around with GPS or even topo maps in the old days in rugged and featureless terrain. But they did it the hard way, by trial and error, backtracking when necessary and trying another path. Also, outdoors people were much more skilled at navigating by dead reckoning in the old days and that art has mostly been lost. I'm not anti-technology by any means. But I'm not a technology-fetishist either. If something is truly useful and doesn't add too much weight or expense or hassle factor, I'm open to it.

And I'm not being hostile. I have tried mapping GPS's. They weigh extra, and I'm a gram weenie when I'm backpacking (not when bike touring) which is why I prefer lighter weight non-mapping GPS for that activity. There are plenty of intersections on some of the trails I've hiked, probably just as many intersections as with bike touring. Some of these intersections are labelled, so I don't need to refer to my map, much less my GPS. Sometimes the intersections are not labelled, or there are more paths than shown on the map, or I have to cut cross-country for some reason (avoid a big patch of ice, trail has been obliterated by landslide, etc) and then a map of some sort assisted by GPS comes in very handy.

The OP of this thread asked for opinions about using a mapping GPS or netbook or tablet versus paper maps for bike touring. It's a topic I'm interested in, because I'm considering buying a tablet computer or smartphone with much larger screen than my current phone at some point, and possibly using that tablet/smartphone for navigation on bike tours. If I seem to be combative in this forum, it's because I'm actually not closed-minded and am open to new perspectives, but I am very much concerned about making the best decision. I don't want to buy expensive devices and then later regret the decision. So far, nothing I've read has shaken my belief that: (a) some sort of paper maps should always be carried to get an overview of the situation and serve as a backup if and when the electronics fails; (b) a tablet (or large screen smartphone) would be a much better addition to a bike touring gear list than a mapping GPS (for those who can't or don't want to carry both).

A lot of backpackers got around featureless rugged terrain for years without GPS and did so without trial and error. But having said that if modern technology is available to make life a bit easier in places like that then I'm not against it. But as you mentioned, you need to know how to use maps and a compass in case GPS or the smartphone technology fails either due to satellite failure, battery failure, unit electronic failure, breakage, whatever, you don't want to be somewhere remote and suddenly find yourself in a serious life threatening jam because your relied on your GPS and was clueless concerning maps.

I ride into remote areas, on road not off, and I go as far as to carry a spare tire in case a tire gets destroyed, a rare event granted, but it can happen and has, without the spare I would have had a couple daunting long walks in very high temperatures, and one person I ran into would have had the same problem had I not happen to come down the same road and gave him my spare tire. So knowing how to use both GPS and maps is wise even though going to the maps due to GPS failure might be a rare event, you don't want to not be prepared for such an event, thinking that may not happen to you could cost you your life and those that are with you. Think smart.

I'm using a very similar setup, with an iPhone 4s, currently 3 months into a 7 month tour around the US and heartily recommend it. The external battery pack can keep the phone going for a week or more if you're judicious about using airplane mode.

The handlebar mount with navigation mode is tremendous for when you're spending the day in an unfamiliar city. Having an internet capable phone has allowed me to download BLM maps, route sheets from local bike clubs, search for places to eat/camp, find Warm Showers hosts, etc.

Apps I use frequently:

Route Planner - just so useful. Use waypoints to generate a route with bike/walking/car directions complete with elevation profiles and the ability to scrub along the route with your finger to see exactly where climbs are. You can export routes as GPS tracks to follow in a seperate program if you want. Be careful as it feels somewhat free to recommend dirt roads in bike mode--really only in issue in rural areas.

Maplets - download public maps onto your phone, from State/Nat'l Parks to city bike maps.

Evernote - for opening documents. Many bike clubs will have race routes/turn by turn directions that can get you through an area where there are no other established routes. I just save directions locally in this program, and then check them when I need to with the phone in airplane mode. You can also enter in your own turn-by-turn directions as a note when you're plugged in at a coffee shop, and refer to them later when riding.

Warm Showers - The iPhone app is fantastic, and I consider it a navigation tool because nothing is more likely to make me change my route than a potential host for a night.

MapMyRide - this can be another useful way to search for routes where you can't find anything else.


I'd say the main trick to making this work is to minimize the times when you're trying to routefind on the fly. The phone is a tremendous tool for research and can store a lot of info that can be referred to while riding, but you don't want to be in the middle of nowhere with a road turning to gravel in front of you and no 3G signal. Spend a few hours getting the route dialed in before each leg and the phone should serve you well.

The other bonus is that it completely eliminates the need for a computer. If you're a blogging fiend, I suggest taking a bluetooth keyboard along and you have the GPS/Laptop/Camera bases covered.

This is very useful info, thanks. BTW by maplets do you mean pdfs? or some other file? Some of the city maps I downloaded were all pdf files...

Hey no problem. Maplets is actually the name of the application. It's really just a PDF reader, but its utility lies in the location based search feature. Anywhere you are, just start up the app and it will tell you what maps are available to download within a certain radius. I usually fire it up before heading into a stretch with State/Nat'l Parks and cities I'll be visiting and download what I need.

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 https://veloroutes.org/.

I just downloaded an all-Europe cycling map from https://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:
https://www.batteryspace.com/batteryh...compliant.aspx
Batteries:
https://www.thomasdistributing.com/16...ml?frontpage=1
Battery charger:
https://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.

I'm resurrecting this old thread because I now own and have extensively used a Garmin Etrex 20 with one of those famous transflective displays. With the backlight turned on, it is no brighter than the AMOLED display on my Nokia N8 in bright sunlight. With the backlight turned off, it is dimmer. In the shade, the Nokia N8 blows away the Etrex 20 with backlight turned off. Both devices have glass fronts and hence reflect sunlight like a mirror if positioned at the wrong angle (easy to fix by simply moving slightly). So this is the final word on the subject. The Nokia N8 is now almost 2 years old, and I am sure there are other smartphones which have equally high quality AMOLED displays at this point. The posters who argued that the transflective display is somehow superior to the best AMOLED displays are either deliberately misrepresenting the truth (perhaps shills for Garmin) or else they simply don't know what they are talking about.

I bought the Etrex20 (with the supposedly amazing transflective display) bundled with Garmin's 100K maps ($249 at REI, before member discounts). Those maps use the Census TIGER road database, which is less accurate than the Navteq road database used by the Nokia N8's builtin offline maps. Garmin's 25K maps supposedly use Navteq maps, but I'm not interested in paying for 25K maps for all the states I plan to tour in (California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, possibly parts of Oregon, Idaho and New Mexico). And the zoom and pan capabilities of the Etrex 20 suck compared to the pinch to zoom, pan to scan capabilities of smartphones. On the other hand, the Etrex 20 maps have topo information, which I really wanted, whereas the Nokia N8 offline maps do not (the online maps do offer very nice terrain relief shading, but that is a moot point because I plan to be offline most of the time and anyway don't feel like paying for data downloads). Also, the Etrex 20 has a high sensitivty GPS receiver, which is essential for getting the GPS to work in forests (like those of the Lassen/Plumas forests where I recently toured) whereas the Nokia N8 has a regular sensitivity receiver, which works fine in the open desert (where I did my previous tours) but not in the forest. Also, the Nokia N8 isn't really a substitute for a true GPS, since it lacks things like support for map datums and different coordinate systems, etc. Finally, the Etrex 20 is more shock and water resistant and has a nice handlebar mount and runs on replaceable batteries (25 hour life for 2 AA batteries) so no need to worry about running out of power in the field. Given that I was traveling in an area with a huge number of dirt roads, with no signs at the intersections, I really needed a GPS to supplement my paper map, and the Etrex 20 fit the bill. So I'm not sorry to have bought it.

For someone who mostly sticks to paved roads, a better option would probably be a smartphone which has: (a) offline maps (i.e. maps which are loaded on the phone's memory, so they can be used without a network connection); (b) high-sensitivity GPS receiver. Topo information and ability to setup map datum and coordinate system (lat-long vs UTM vs British national grid, etc) would be nice, but not essential if you are mostly on paved roads.

rev, good points to bring up with the pluses and minuses of both systems. I still havent taken the time to properly explore being able to load off line maps on my phone, and so still havent used that aspect, although it seems at first and second glance to not be easily setup for a regular joe-schmoe like me (again, my idea was to use it just when needed and obviously not online).
I still say that this is a market to be taken advantage of, ie , selling offline maps for a fee that can be used in phones and used when needed--although I guess its counter productive when you have proper gps units (car, bike and hike, whatever) with this system in place, so companies dont want to get into the phone business too (and the potential loss of income from people sharing the files maybe too?)

anyway, interesting take on the topic by you, thanks for the update and the ins and outs of both.