Maps et al.

[Rymo]

Yes, the warmshowers community was something I just stumbled upon, and posting stuff ahead is not a bad shout...

As i'm going with one friend it may make sense to just share the weight of a good few fold out maps each.

Thanks for the replies, I have 3 months to sort it all out

 

[CopperBrompton]

GPS are wonderful if you can be bothered to sit and preprogram them - or for that matter stick to the route that is programmed - however, whilst the maps are wickedly detailed -and very useful for filling in detail as you travel across big towns and cities - the screen size is so small that when zoomed out to the sort of scale you need for navigating between points more than 10k apart they become almost useless.

This is why the GPS vs maps debate is so silly. Each have their own strengths & weaknesses, and the ideal approach is to use a combination of the two.

Maps are brilliant for getting an overview of a route, and for general big-picture tasks. GPS is brilliant for delegating the navigation task for your chosen route while you sit back and enjoy the scenery.

Maps are great if you change your mind en-route, and GPS is great for quickly getting you to the nearest town when you find yourself in a howling gale.

 

[iLB]

I would purchase one big one (to give you an idea, record you actual route and give you place names to aim for) and then raid the tourist information offices for the freebies. We cycled from the UK, via the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway & into Finland before we had to buy our first maps on our world tour. We did not buy maps for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Serbia or Macedonia (some countries we simply had to accept defeat and purchase them for - Finland, Poland, Greece, Turkey & Iran (which went unused) are the ones that spring to mins immediately). That was 5,000 miles before having to purchase our first map. As we left each country, or when we felt we had enough to carry (rephrase my OH had enough to carry) we posted home the maps that were no longer needed, for safe keeping and to keep a record of where we had been etc. In all, we purchased very few offical maps depsite covering 9,000 miles before the tour had to be aborted.

Did you make detailed route plans before setting off without maps or just have a vague idea of the direction you wanted to go and places you wanted to pass through? Planning to have detailed daily route cards for our ride to Romania, which are in theory good enough to go without a map, which proved correct on LEJOG last summer. But on that occasion we had Google maps on a phone to fall back on, no such fall back option with the data roaming charges. Might just have to be pages ripped out of a 1:1,000,000 European Road Atlas.

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

Did you make detailed route plans before setting off without maps or just have a vague idea of the direction you wanted to go and places you wanted to pass through? Planning to have detailed daily route cards for our ride to Romania, which are in theory good enough to go without a map, which proved correct on LEJOG last summer. But on that occasion we had Google maps on a phone to fall back on, no such fall back option with the data roaming charges. Might just have to be pages ripped out of a 1:1,000,000 European Road Atlas.

We just had a rough idea on where we wanted to go to and allowed what we wanted to do on the day, what the road conditions were like and what information obtained from tourist information offices and the likes to control where we went. We don't go for detailed planning, not even for the JOGLE we are doing next month. We could not tell you where we would be staying until we had arrived. It only ever really let us down badly the once.

Also when I stated we were in Finland before we purchased our first maps, I actually meant paid for our first maps. We still had maps, we just obtained them free of charge in most of the countries we passed through. Photo-ing road side information boards and picking up regional maps from tourist information offices is a great way of saving money.

 

[Blue Hills]

SatNav: Did you find the free maps detailed enough to find small roads/stay off the big ones?

 

[martint235]

Did you make detailed route plans before setting off without maps or just have a vague idea of the direction you wanted to go and places you wanted to pass through? Planning to have detailed daily route cards for our ride to Romania, which are in theory good enough to go without a map, which proved correct on LEJOG last summer. But on that occasion we had Google maps on a phone to fall back on, no such fall back option with the data roaming charges. Might just have to be pages ripped out of a 1:1,000,000 European Road Atlas.

Andy, I've got a spare GPS unit you could borrow. You should be able to download OSM maps for most of the way.

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

SatNav: Did you find the free maps detailed enough to find small roads/stay off the big ones?

yep. It is quite surprising what you can find free of charge when you look at various 'regional' magazines and the likes and Norway in particular has stunningly good (if very thin, so pick up 2 copies) paper maps equivalent of the OS 1:25,000 detail. We still have all the maps we used for navigation because we marked our actual route cycled on them, then posted them home as we left each country concerned.

We only had one issue with one map (out of the back of a regional campsite guide) in Germany where we got slightly 'lost' (not helped by the fact we went off-road via a cycle track into a forest), but the Germans are exceptionally good at stopping (sometimes in the middle of a road junction) to check you are OK and give directions.

 

[iLB]

Andy, I've got a spare GPS unit you could borrow. You should be able to download OSM maps for most of the way.

This sounds very promising, will drop you a PM.