can any one help me find the best route

[ianredman]

I’m in the middle of planning a charity ride from Liverpool city centre, to Paris Eiffel tower for this summer , iv been looking all over the internet on the best routes ,,

Can anybody help with the best sights to plan routes?

As where working with bauer media we have to hit Manchester and Birmingham on route for radio/TV promotion prepossess .

And we have a hand cyclist with us so the route would need to be road, or paths only

Can any one help

 

[vernon]

There's too many variables to come up with a single 'best route'.

I believe that the RAC and AA online route planners have a bicycle option.
Google maps also has a bicycle option though paradoxically, the pedestrian option gives a better route.
ww.viamichelin.co.uk has a bicycle option

All of the above suggests optimum routs between two fixed points.
For all of the above, you need to break the journey into shorter legs for the software to work.

If you want gradient profiles then www.mapmyride.com does the job as does www.ridewithgps.com

Hope that helps

 

[Tigerbiten]

I agree on to many variables.

Do you need to go through London ??
Are you camping or B&B's/hotels ??
How are you crossing the Channel ??
Main roads or back roads/Sustrans routes ??

My way of doing something like this is to have a rough idea of what route I want to travel on.
Then decide how far I want to travel each day.
Then from the starting point that day, find somewhere to stop for the night at roughly the right distance.
I using the likes of www.bikehike.co.uk to then fine tune to route between these two points.
Repeat for the next day.

I like BikeHike as you can see the OSMcycle map which gives you a nice veiw of where both the hills and the Sustrans route are.

The NCR62 trans-pennine route runs Liverpool to Mancester, so can you make use of part of that ??
Then something like Manchester - Nantwich - Telford - Birmingham is probably the flattest.
After Birmingham it depends on how you cross the Channel. Oxford -> Newhaven or Cambridge -> Dover.
It's probably easiest to get to Paris from Dieppe as there's a cycle route most of the way.

 

[ceepeebee]

Bike hike will also do your elevations on the fly, which is very helpful, make sure you set it to follow not just roads (or similar ambiguous option) that way it'll take you on cycle paths as well as roads.

Warning though, some NCRs are rutted horse tracks in places (I'm looking at you route 21 south of London)

 

[Tigerbiten]

Bike hike will also do your elevations on the fly, which is very helpful, make sure you set it to follow not just roads (or similar ambiguous option) that way it'll take you on cycle paths as well as roads.

It's not so much it can be set to show elevations I find handy on BikeHike, it's that it can be set to show gradients.
That way you have a chance to find a route around the silly steep stuff if you want.

If you set it to not follow roads then it maps as the crow flies.
So you need to plot the route corner by corner off the OS/OsMcycle map, to get it to follow the off-road routes.
It's possible to do this to get an idea of distances, it just takes longer and is a bit more of a hassle.

 

[ceepeebee]

Sorry yes, gradients.

I don't do corner by corner on it, I just click undo if it does something obviously silly, doing half-km lumps along the way. It certainly doesn't do crow-flying though, it'll follow roads/paths the whole time (just occasionally counter-intuitively)