I'm routed!

I had made the decision to move the "master" copy of the routes from Garmin Basecamp to GPSies.com because of the better routing capabilities. The issue with Basecamp is that a route can only have a single mode of travel (such as car or bike) and the routing algorithm makes it impossible to (for example) hop from a road to the parallel cycle path, or go the wrong way down a one-way street which although it would be hazardous in many situations is perfectly normal inside the "old town" area of many cities such as Arezzo and Florence.

Having decided that I was happy with the GPSies routing, the next question was how well it would transfer into sensible turn by turn navigation on the Garmin GPS, so today I tested it out. I went to GPSies and laid down a route that used streets, footpath, cycle lanes, shared path etc., moved the GPX route to the Garmin and it worked perfectly!

I have also this weekend completed the task of updating the wiki to refer to all the new (routed) maps that are in GPSies. They can be downloaded from the wiki but just in case I will retrieve all of them and store them in Google Drive as well. I've included waypoints for a couple of places where lunch looks likely along the cycle routes. Some days I expect us to have lunch at our destination, it depends on the distance, the amount of climb and the dawdle-to-take-photos factor.

Small optimisations

I've spent a little time this weekend optimising the last two days of riding. In particular I managed to take some back-tracking out of the route through Monte Leone. This has also reduced the distance and the amount of climbing by a small amount.

For the last day I have changed the route to connect up with the cycleway that runs from Novafeltria down to Rimini because it gives us a much easier run into town following the river. This has in fact made the route slightly longer but it should take about the same time.

I've also cross-posted the wiki to the Facebook pages of each of the hotels just in case they are interested and to remind them that we are coming!

bikemap.net is not living up to expectations

I'm afraid I am going to have to move the map display of the daily routes from bikemap.net. It is proving too unreliable. Such as shame as the presentation (when it works) is really good.

Update: I have moved all the presentation to http://www.gpsies.com which has exactly what I need, and Klaus Bechtold, the site owner has been incredibly responsive in answering my questions. The wiki now contains links to GPSies for:

• The overall route overview map
• The route map for each day
• A QR code link for each day (takes you to that day's route at GPSies)

As an added benefit, the daily maps allow you to download a copy of the route in multiple formats.