We just had probably the best crêpes I’ve ever had, thanks to my friend Yann. Delicious, merci!!
Paris au printemps
Flew up to Paris to explore the city for a day… Some photos and obligatory selfies…
An interesting baguette we saw in Le Marais district of Paris, near the Picasso museum that we visited on Sunday.
High tech route planning on-the-fly for cycle touring
In addition to our travelogue, I’m going to start making some posts describing our particular style of cycle touring, in case others may be interested in the more technical details of our trip. One of the things I love about cycle touring is that there are as many ways to have fun touring as there are tourists, and I think we are no exception. I hope our experience is useful to some of you. For the first article, I’m going to write about how we have planned our routes and the other options we considered.
Introduction and Goals
For a short tour, it’s possible to completely plan your route, your stops, etc. beforehand. For longer tours, it’s important to have the ability to be flexible and plan specific routes as you go. With modern smartphones and GPS units, it’s become easier to do this without bringing a laptop or lots of maps. I wanted to find a solution where I could plan very good routes both ahead of time and on-the-fly using just my smartphone and a GPS unit. The GPS unit needed to have the ability to follow a route and show turn-by-turn directions.
Cycle computer
Although I really liked the Garmin 1000, with its color touchscreen, it has a really clunky interface, and there’s no way way to send a route from your smartphone to the Garmin. Garmin has the bike GPS market almost locked up, but after some research, I found a good alternative! The Wahoo ELEMNT is a $350USD bike GPS with almost all the features of the Garmin 1000, plus it has a kick ass smartphone app that supports, among other power features, the ability to sync routes with several websites and also to send GPX and TCX routes directly from your smartphone!
I made the plunge and bought one, and I love it. The black and white screen is not as nice as the Garmin’s color touchscreen, but the route syncing and smartphone app more than make up for it. It also has better battery life in my experience, which is important since we are living on solar power for much of our tour.
Smartphone
The smartphone choice was more about worldwide internet coverage than route planning capabilities. I decided on Google Project Fi service in order to get coverage in 135 countries for roughly the same reasonable price. Cell phone coverage is important for the ability to plan routes even when WiFi is not available. This service only works with a select few Android phones, and I settled on the Nexus 5x for its lower cost and decent specs.
Websites for route planning
Now, the only thing left is to actually plan the routes to send to the GPS. There are several services I have been using to do this.
Strava – although the web site is not optimized for mobile, it does work okay to plan routes by going to www.strava.com/athletes/routes which you have to open in Chrome or Safari. Unfortunately there is no mobile app. It has been my favorite option because:
- It syncs directly with the Wahoo ELEMNT (when on WiFi) and also with the smartphone app, so you can sync over cellular, and then later send to the ELEMNT even with no internet connection.
- By default, it follows roads that Strava has found to be popular with cyclists. This means that you usually end up cycling on roads where actual cyclists go. This can be good and bad, so you have to pay some attention. In areas where mountain biking is popular, it will tend to pick off-road routes vs. paved routes, which has put us in some difficulty on our light touring bikes at times. In areas where racing groups are popular, it may pick really difficult climbs because that’s where the racers like to train. In commuting areas, it will often pick busy main streets rather than quiet more comfortable roads for touring. All that said, it will almost always pick a really decent route just by selecting a start and end point, and it’s relatively easy to add multiple routing points to go elsewhere. The heatmap overlay is very helpful to visually see where the popular routes are. Once you save the route, just sync the ELEMNT over WiFi (using your phone’s hotspot feature works), or sync the Wahoo app and then send the route over Bluetooth.
There are some down sides with Strava however. It is very fiddly to use on the phone, requiring good eyesight and very precise finger movement. It’s also somewhat buggy, sometimes locking up and requiring you to start over again. And it’s not possible on mobile to insert new way points into the route, making it tricky to adjust the route that is automatically calculated. It also requires you to use the frustrating “Manual Mode” sometimes for roads that it doesn’t know exists or roads that obviously connect together, but that it doesn’t realize do.
Google maps – Google maps is an obvious choice for finding cycling directions. When you are online, it has an option to suggest cycling routes instead of driving. The routes are generally good, but they very strongly favor dedicated bike paths, including unpaved ones, so it can sometimes give directions not suitable for light touring bikes but good for mountain bikes. When you get the directions, you can either follow them on your phone, or you can send them to the ELEMNT using the following procedure:
- Select the option in Google Maps to share the route and select Copy to Clipboard.
- Paste the directions into a text editor, like Google Keep.
- Look for the link at the end of the directions posted that looks like https://goo.gl/maps/ABCDEFG. Copy this link.
- Visit https://mapstogpx.com and paste in the link into the field and tap the button to download the GPX file.
- Most of the time you can simply open the GPX file using the ELEMNT app, and it will import it immediately.
- Sometimes the ELEMNT app gives an error about an invalid GPX file. This can sometimes be solved by simplifying the GPX file by visiting http://m.gpsies.com and turning on the highest level of Route Simplication under Options. This will give a much smaller GPX file, which usually works better and with no noticeable loss of information.
One unfortunate problem with this: Google maps often gives several route options, and you can select which one you want by tapping on it. However, mapstogpx.com will always only pick the first route option that Google gives, so it can be frustrating to get the route you want. One workaround is to add a secondary waypoint to force the first route suggestion to be the one you want.
Find GPX courses online – many websites have GPX routes for download for great touring routes that you can find by Googling particular areas. For example, Italy has GPX files available for its EuroVelo routes at http://italy-cycling-guide.info/ . Once you’ve downloaded them, it’s easy to import into the ELEMNT app, though some GPX files may need to be simplified (see instructions above).
Use the Wahoo app – The ELEMNT app has an option to search for a destination either by tapping it or searching for a name. This is very convenient, but in my experience, it does not give good directions. It tends to pick the absolute shortest path, ignoring cycling routes, road surface, etc. Hopefully they will improve this in future updates, as this is definitely the easiest option.
Other options
I considered many other options that may work for others, so here I will list them and explain why I decided not to use this option.
Garmin cycle computers – I could not find any way to plan a route on the smartphone and send it to the Garmin without having a laptop. I tried everything I could think of, including importing GPX files to Garmin Connect website and then syncing over Bluetooth using the Connect app (very difficult and ridiculously buggy from a smartphone), using a USB OTG connector on my phone to connect the Garmin device via USB (couldn’t mount the file system in order to copy GPX routes), and lots of others, all ending in failure. If you are bringing a laptop with you, though, this might be a very good solution for you, as it’s relatively easy to copy a GPX file to the Garmin using a USB cable.
Maps.me – This is definitely a great app to have with you on a cycling tour, especially because it has offline bicycle routing. However, as of this writing, you cannot export its directions to GPX files, so it’s impossible to get the directions on your GPS device. This means that you must mount your smartphone on your bike and follow the directions on the screen. This may work for some people who expect to have power every night to charge their phone, but since we are using solar many days, I found that Maps.me uses an extremely high amount of battery to do the routing and provide directions, so it would not work for us.
Google maps – another must have app, of course, and it is possible to download offline map areas. However, when offline, you can only get driving directions, not cycling. Also, you would have to mount the smartphone on your bike, and while Google Maps uses significantly less power than Maps.me, it is still too much to keep charged by solar power every day.
Paper maps – I know many tourists swear by paper maps, which require no batteries, are often available with water resistant coatings, and keep you free of technological distractions. There is definitely something to be said for this approach, but it was difficult for me to find good paper maps for the whole around-the-world trip that we have planned. It would have involved lots of research and stops at tourist offices, etc to collect all the maps we need, and they take up space and weight.
Other apps I recommend for touring
OsmAnd – a good, if not a little clunky, front end to the amazing and free OpenStreetMap maps. It includes cycling modes, routing, downloading offline areas, following GPX tracks, and tons more.
Rome2Rio – great option for finding ferries, flights, public transportation, and other routes for those segments where you cannot or choose not to ride.
DotTrax – developed by a friend of mine in San Diego, this Android app is a great replacement for a cycling computer with lots of options including combining multi-day tracks, and real-time wind direction reports so you know when you’ve got a headwind or tailwind. It also connects with wireless HRMs. If you will be using your phone as your GPS unit, I highly recommend this app for tracking your ride.
Les mistrals!
The mistral winds were blowing strong yesterday, so we were very happy to have a day off riding to spend with our friends sightseeing in Cassis and Marseilles. These northerly winds are known to be strong this time of year between winter and spring and can come and go.
We had a great lunch in Cassis at a restaurant on the water, and for dinner, we made Mexican food (chicken tacos with pico de gallo, rice and beans, and margaritas) for our friends, a reminder of their visit to California.
I think we’ve decided on our future route for next week. We are planning to cycle through the Gorges de Verdon and then head south to join the Cote d’Azur near Fréjus and continue along the coast from there. This means we will take four days instead of two to get to Antibes, but we will get to see both the Verdon region as well as the coast. I’ve updated our itinerary estimates on our route plan, and even with this, and with a more leisurely place through Italy, we have 7 extra days on our visa in case we need to use it.
This morning we are off to Paris for one night!
Il fait très froid !
It never warmed up above 10°C today, starting off in Avignon at a brisk 6°. But, we had massive tailwinds all the way to our destination near the Marseilles airport, where we are staying with friends for the weekend. Otherwise the ride was good, quiet country roads and wide shoulders most of the way. No touristy stops except for a cemetery where we heard some famous Frenchmen were buried. It was too cold for us to be in the mood for sightseeing though, so we pressed on and stopped at a cafe to warm up until our friends could meet us. It’s really good to see them again, as it’s been 4 years since they visited me last in San Diego.
To be honest, I’m so happy to be off the bike, and I don’t want to see it for a few days. We’ve decided that from here on, we will try to limit our riding to 80-100km/day and no more than 4 days in a row, so that we have time to see things and relax and not feel like we are doing nothing but riding.
After the weekend, we have four choices for how to continue towards Italy. If you have a recommendation, please give us a comment.
- Ride coastal roads on the Cote d’Azur. Pros: lots of beautiful scenery, lots of places to camp and stop, some bike paths and boardwalks, warmer weather, touristy so it will be easy to find anything we might need. Cons: might be very busy traffic, some roads will be not really suitable for cycling, very hilly along the rugged coast with lots of traffic in places, more expensive, lots of tourist traps.
- Ride through Luberon and Verdones regions. Pros: beautiful scenery, quiet and popular cycling routes, more laid back, less expensive. Cons: very mountainous so will be harder riding and take longer, somewhat cooler weather, fewer options for camping and lodging.
- Ride through the countryside between the coast and Verdones. Not sure this is really a very interesting area or what the traffic will be like. Don’t see a lot of info about it, but it’s a more direct route with less hills.
- Take the train to Antibes and continue riding from there. This would save us some time and get us away from the most developed parts of the coast, but it would mean probably taking our bikes apart to take them on the train, and we might miss out on some nice parts of France and reduce our time spent here.
Foodie day
We rode through many cute towns today, including Sommières, the start of a gorgeous 20km long dedicated bike path called Sommières Voie Verte, which wound through country, farms, small towns, and under Roman bridges.
We stopped in Nîmes to do a little sightseeing before making our way to Avignon.
The riding after the bike path was mixed between country roads and busy thruways. The French still win no awards for driving, having us white-knuckled on our handlebars as they skim by us. The quiet rural roads are nice except that every car is going 40kph over the speed limit and there’s no room to pass. The main roads are clogged with traffic (where is everyone going??), have no shoulder, and the cars refuse to slow down even with incoming traffic, giving us just one or two feet of space, well under the legal 4.5ft required and sign posted… I love everything else about France so far, but my fantasy of living here and riding my bike all over is fading quickly. Spanish drivers were 100x better, so courteous and patient. Maybe we just need to find the right area for cycling; we haven’t seen very many other cyclists.
We made up for it though with the food, which we splurged on a little today, since we haven’t had a proper French dinner. Wow, it was really incredible. Here’s some food porn…
Croissant aux aumonds
Quail egg casserole
Steak with foie gras sauce
Cod with buerre blanc sauce over quinoa
Chocolate cake
France ! Je t’adore ! Les voitures françaises… Je te déteste !
What a day with too many kilometers… Because of the rain forecast, we changed our plans last minute from camping at a vineyard in the country to an uber cheap crappy hostel in the middle of nowhere so that we could stay a bit more dry. Unfortunately that meant we had to ride an extra 25km, making today a bit of a chore. I don’t like the idea of grinding out distance on our bike tour, but with our flight and hotel in Paris already booked, we couldn’t take a rest day. Steve and I agreed to limit our rides to 100km from now on, ideally 80km (about 50 miles) per day.
That said, before the rain and traffic, we had a lovely day cycling through adorable towns and vineyards in the Languedoc region. We stopped at our first boulangerie for a croissant aux aumonds, and I think we are going to gain weight in France. Omg! I want one of those every morning!
We followed the uncompleted EuroVelo 8 for bits and pieces of the ride, but soon joined really busy highways leading to Montpelier.
Everyone warned us about the Portuguese drivers, but they were an absolute delight compared to the French, who had me yelling obscenities a dozen times today, for cutting me off, passing too close, honking at me, and various other rude and unsafe manuevers. For a country with the most well-known cycling race in the world, I was really disappointed with the horrible way the drivers treat cyclists, at least in this region… The other cyclists we met, however, were awesome; everyone said Bonjour, and a few greeted us with big smiles. And in a lot of places, especially close to Montpelier, we had dedicated bike paths that paralleled the highway.
Had a pizza for lunch at a really cute pizzeria in a tiny town, where the neighboring patrons heard my bad French and assumed I couldn’t understand them and wondered out loud whether we were German, Canadian, or Swiss (we have Swiss cycling caps, a gift from one of our WarmShowers guests). I didn’t have the heart to disappoint them and say we were American, although given that this region voted overwhelmingly for Marine Le Pen, maybe they like Donald Trump…
We unfortunately had no time to see Montpelier, aside from riding straight through the downtown area, along the rail lines, where we joined other cyclists dodging the commuter trains and slipping on the slick stone paving, wet with the fresh rain that had just begun to fall. We passed through an area that felt like New Orleans with some transplanted African Americans lamenting loudly (in English) about the difference of life here vs back home in the states, and some other kind of gritty but a little hipster urban neighborhoods.
Our lodging for the night is just barely one step above a campsite in the rain. It’s a hostel chain called Hotel F1, where we have to crawl over our bikes to get to the bed and sink, you don’t get any towels, soap, etc (I’m surprised we get sheets on the bed), and we have a bunk bed in the room, and the shared bathroom is not much more than a stinky hole in the ground with no toilet seat cover… But it was almost as cheap as camping, next to a discount supermarket where we got stuff for dinner, and sheltered from the crazy thunder and lightning and rain that’s going on outside our window…
We are going to hole up here until the rain stops, watching Les Marseillais, which seems to be the French version of Jersey Shores. Should be tomorrow morning sometime and then head towards Avignon. I was there last time on a cycling tour in 2003, and I hope it’s as cute and beautiful as I remember!
Kicked out of the grocery store!
Followed the French election a little last night, as everyone in the campground was talking about it. What a crazy result! What is happening in this world??
Very flat coastal day of riding from Argeles-sur-Mer to Narbonne. We cycled through many beach towns, very quiet for the season, but beautiful, as well as lots of cycling paths that form the beginnings of France’s EuroVelo 8 route. It’s far from compete and we had lots of various surface, and it went from shared roads to dedicated paths many times. The final part of the day was through the Narbonnaise en Méditerranée Natural Regional Park, where we cycled for over 10km on narrow strips of land besides railroad tracks, with ocean on either side.
We saw a few other cycle tourists today and rode part of the way with a guy from Germany who was on the 9th month of his 1-year around-Europe tour, heading back to Germany. Even with 23kg of gear on his sturdy mountainbike (about twice the weight of what we have), he was beating us to the top of every climb. Amazing what that much time on the bike will do for your fitness.
We spent a lot of time in Narbonne looking around this adorable city and getting food for dinner at the market. There are some historic ruins from 118BC near the cathedral and a very scenic river running thru the center. The styles here are quite different from Spain, which is refreshing. While we were shopping across the street from the cathedral, a security guard came up to us and said something really fast in French. We smiled and I said, “désolé, je ne comprends pas”, and he said, “fermé!” Closed. But we had walked right in with the lights on and doors open and never saw any indication the shop was closing. He said we had to leave and couldn’t buy the things in our hands. We protested, and the cashier took pity on us and re-opened her register to check us out. On Monday everything is closed in France, but we were able to find a bakery and one other shop open to complete our shopping for our dinner.
Speaking of food, France is definitely quite a step up in terms of average quality of the food so far. And I’m so happy to have a choice of hundreds of cheeses in the market. Too bad we aren’t here for that many days. Here are some pics of our restaurant and supermarket meals and snacks…
Omg, the French make pâte out of everything. Pâte of speculoos cookies?? It’s like liquid crack frosting. Steve and I ate the whole jar in 24 hours. ?
Tomorrow is a long day and it’s supposed to rain later in the day so we plan to start as early as possible and we changed from camping to a hotel to stay dry in Montpelier.
À demain !
Belleville Rendezvous (Triplets of Belleville)
Today we crossed the Pyrenees into France, and although the Spanish Catalans say that the region extends into France, I haven’t heard anyone speak anything but French. It’s funny actually how quickly it changed from 100% Spanish/Catalan to 100% French. 30 seconds after crossing the border, a group of motor bikers joined as at the summit and were speaking French.
In Girona, Catalan pride was very evident with the numerous flags and even the local bike advocacy group’s pamphlet was all in Catalan.
We said farewell to our awesome WarmShowers host George and had breakfast at La Fabrica (it was such a fun novelty for us that we had to go back) and made our way towards Figueres. For whatever reason, the route that Strava chose for us as the “most popular” one took us on tiny hiking trails through farmland. It was peaceful and quiet but not ridable in sections on our touring bikes.
It was Sant Jordi day, so there were tons of people in all the city squares and dozens of people asked us to buy roses for “tu novia”.
The Dali museum was a must see stop, and it’s pretty cool, as the museum itself was designed by Dali. We couldn’t go in because we couldn’t find a place to keep our bikes safely, and there was a long line already waiting.
The climb to France was pretty tough, but we were eager to get to our fourth country, so we had the energy for it.
You can tell the country changed because the asphalt on the French side abruptly changed for the better. That only lasted a short time though.
The French side of the Mediterranean has been beautiful so far. We found a great beach-side campground and I’ve been practicing my French. It’s clear that we will have to stretch our budget on this section of the trip as campground, hostels, and food are noticeably more expensive. We will borrow against our future budget in eastern Europe and Asia. It’s also clear that my French is really rusty, as my accent is not understandable by some.
Today reminded me of the French movie Belleville Rendezvous (Triplets of Belleville) as we suffered up the climb and then all the frogs chirping in the campground in France that we haven’t heard much in Spain. You must watch the movie if you like cycling and wacky French movies!
Roses, hookers, and cycling cafes
Little did we know that tomorrow is Sant Jordi (Saint George’s) Day in the Catalan region of Spain. After seeing lots of people over the past few days with roses, we finally asked around and learned that on April 23, the guys give girls roses, and the guys get books… Seems a bit of an odd exchange to me, but we’ve seen book stalls popup on the street alongside rose sellers, and everything in the shape of roses, from chocolate to change purses.
Yesterday we rode from Sitges to a small town just north of Barcelona, stopping in Barcelona for lunch. We camped with a Gamping.com host for the night before heading off to Girona today, where we met up with our fantastic host for the evening, who has intrigued us with stories of his past cycling tours and given us great advice for our route tomorrow.
We stopped at a cycling cafe in Girona called La Fabrica, which is known to have pro cyclists visit. We saw hundreds of other serious cyclists out today in the road, at the cafe, and all over town. Finally we fit right in, in our Spandex.
There’s some kind of music festival and street fair going on in Girona, so we found a place to watch the crowd and checked out the popular sights.
On the quiet roads between Barcelona and Girona, we saw a number of working girls, simply sitting on a chair on the side of the road and dressed up really pretty. To be honest, it took us going by 3 or 4 of them to start to ask what’s going on here and then come to the realization. Our suspicion was confirmed when we saw one girl being dropped back off at her chair by a young gentleman.
Tomorrow we cross into France!