Planning: Itinerary

It was six months ago today that I decided I would take a bike trip of 4000 miles next summer. In that six months I've done a lot of planning to develop my initial idea of riding a big loop on which I would see my six siblings, my mother, several cousins, my in-laws, and friends from grade school, high school, and graduate school. The planning has been in three areas: itinerary, gear, and physical conditioning. In this post I'm going to write about the planning of the itinerary. I'll publish separate posts in which I discuss gear and physical conditioning.

About my audience: In writing this blog I know that my audience ranges from people who will enjoy my adventure vicariously but who do not even ride a bike, to others who will plan a big tour. I hope that what I write will interest all of you. If you want to see all the detail of my planning then click on the links which are indicated by bronze text.

Itinerary

Creating the itinerary consists of choosing a route, determining where to stay each night, and finding where to eat. As I wrote in a previous blog post, I used Google maps on my phone to create an initial route that would let me visit all the people I mentioned above. That initial route looked something like this:

Each of the green and white icons indicates one of the locations where I would spend a night or two with family and friends. I used Google maps to connect those locations in order to create the route above.

One of the first changes I made to my initial route was to have it finish by traveling south on 9W on the west side of the Hudson River, crossing the George Washington Bridge, and then coming down the east side of the Hudson on the Greenway. That would be a glorious way to end this epic adventure! I had initially planned to start my trip by end my trip by riding to Newark and then taking the PATH train home, the reverse of the starting the trip by taking the PATH train from Manhattan to Newark and then riding south. But it's one thing to start a 4000-mile bike trip with a train ride, and altogether another thing to finish such a bike trip with a train ride. (See The Start of MY 4000-Mile Trip: Getting to Newark.)

Besides changing how I complete my trip, in the last six months I've refined the route as I've added a few more homes (three of which belong to friends in a Facebook group who responded to my blog) and many campgrounds where I'll stay, and the location of many places to eat. Here's how the route looks now, but without any icons:

The website I use to plan my route, www.ridewithgps.com, has an app I use on my phone for navigation and recording of my trip. Because of the length of my trip I have divided it in 14 routes as shown by the colors in the map above. The 14 routes can be found on my Big Loop event page. Click on any of the 14 links to see one of the routes, including icons for homes, motels, campgrounds, and restaurants. To see where I plan to stay each night, click on the Go-to-route link for a route. You will then see a list of destinations with mileages. For example, the first route, Big Loop-01, shows the following:

69 Danboro 69

150 Lancaster 80

208 Artillery Ridge Campground 58

278 Bethesda 70

294 Alexandria 17

This means that I'll spend the first night in Danboro which is 69 miles from the start, the second night in Lancaster which is 150 miles from the start and 80 miles from Danboro, etc.

In solving the problem of how to travel from one home to another I had to find the following:

1. Roads on which it would be safe to travel
2. Campgrounds or motels spaced at good distances for a day's ride
3. Restaurants or cafes where I could eat dinner when camping or staying in a motel

I usually start by telling RideWithGPS a start and end location and then let the website, which uses Google maps, plot a route optimized for driving while avoiding highways. There is an option to optimize for cycling but I find that it often results in too many turns as it does whatever it can to avoid traffic. I can see how almost any road looks using the street view feature by dragging the little man in the lower-right-hand corner of the route onto a road. For example, here's what the street view shows near the highest point of my trip on the Blue Ridge Parkway:

To find campgrounds or motels spaced at intervals that would be good distances for a day's ride, I need to take into account how much climbing there will be. Fortunately RideWithGPS not only shows how much climbing, measured in feet per mile, there is on a route or a portion of a route, it also displays an estimated length of time for me to ride based on my riding history.

When I'm riding I snack lightly throughout the day and then have one big meal at the end of the day, so I need to find somewhere to eat that is close to each campground or motel where I'll stay. This is not always easy, and there will be several days that I buy my food at a restaurant and then carry it 25 miles to my campground (I wouldn't want to eat a big meal and then ride such a distance).

I have now planned where to stay every night of my trip except for the nights between Atlanta, GA, and Carbondale, IL. I had hoped to stay in Nashville with some friends from graduate school, but I recently learned that they will not be home during my ride. So the entire route from Atlanta to Carbondale is up for grabs.

I've created a spreadsheet that shows where I'll stay each night, how many miles I ride each day, how many hours are estimated I'll ride each day, and lots of other information. You can view the spreadsheet here. I enter all the items that are blue and then the spreadsheet calculates everything else.

When I first decided to take this trip I thought that each morning I would look for three possible destinations for the night, with short, medium, and long distances, the way I remember my friend Mike Macewich and I did on our trip from Springfield to Chicago several decades ago. Obviously I've abandoned that plan.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions.