Rowan

There are guide books on all sorts of places, some cycling-specific and some not.

However, one of the things about guide books is the position the author might take on developing it. By that I mean the author may have interests or abilities beyond or well short of mine. As an illustration, I knew the guy who developed the first Lonely Planet guide for Tasmania (we met briefly in Hobart on his way through). Two things emerged:

1. He was on a schedule to do this job and get to New Zealand and research that ASAP.

2. He was a mighty lean and fit rider who could ride all day and think nothing of it.

Inevitably, his Tasmanian guide came out, a friend and I perused it carefully, and came to the conclusion that it really was impractical for all but the fittest cyclists to even contemplate the sorts of days he proposed. For a while after it was published, we would meet cyclists on the road who were looking somewhat tired... and they were referenciing the guide.

There are other guides I have used that have been more for the leisure cyclist -- the ones who do 10 miles in a day, don't have a particularly high level of fitness and who can tolerate riding congested paths.

I'm not saying those guides aren't useful for many other people. They just aren't for me. And I used them as examples to show that this is a somewhat more complex issue than first appears.

Probably the most useful has been a combination of paper maps and signposting on the North Sea and other fiets routes in northern Europe that I have followed several times. They've taken me places I've wanted to see in good time and on good networks.

The worst was a route through Adelaide that was based on signs and a booklet that meandered pointlessly through alleys, laneways, broken paths and crowded MUPs.

We've picked up a smalll-scale map of Scotland, and there is in the hostel room here one of the best guide books about things to do and places to go that I have ever seen (and I've worked extensively in the tourism industry, so I have an idea of what is good and bad). We'll have a look around Edinburgh in the next couple of days, and plan out some riding in the meantime.

Thanks contango. It's just one of those things -- we had a particularly long flight sequence from Japan, and we basically spent a day recovering by sitting on buses and ferries seeing the sights. The trouble is... we might have trouble now tearing ourselves away from Scotland!!!