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.

Map presentation

If you have visited the wiki at https://sites.google.com/a/keogh.net.au/apennines/home, the pages for the individual days have a map of the day's ride. These have been built using the online facility at www.bikemap.net, using the .GPX files originally built in Garmin Basecamp. The bikemap.net site has been going through some glitches as a consequence of a major upgrade to the site's software. I hope it stabilises soon. One of the "coming soon" features that was broken by the upgrade will allow me to replace the primitive map that is on the home page.

Perhaps one day Google Maps will have similar functionality and I will be able to use it instead.

Maps, maps and more maps

I started out the planning using the OSM Velomap Italy. It was OK but cycle routes had annoying little gaps in them which cause Basecamp to do all kinds of weird routes which no number of intermediate points will fix.

Last night I discovered that http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ has what is (to my eyes) much better rendering of what are essentially the same data. I mean who needs those huge arrows for one way streets? That's only advisory on a bicycle anyway :-) So 90MB of downloads later (one copy for Basecamp, one for my GPS), I have better maps to work with! I must say that the process of requesting and receiving the map data is very polished! I wonder who is paying for it?

That's why cartography is an art as well as a science. These OSM maps are probably good enough to use on my Garmin when we are travelling. I may still purchase the City Navigator maps for use in Florence, Arezzo etc. Of course my other point of reference is Google Maps but in Italy today there is no bicycle routing,  Maybe by the time we get there?

Update

Yet another source of OSM cycle mapping data http://www.openfietsmap.nl/downloads/europe has excellent cartography and contours as well, so the advantages of both the others.

Only problem is the size of the download, over 3.8GB as a single zip file foe western Europe.