Route choices

[ricksavery]

Hello
I plan / hope to do LEJOG this year and have been spending a bit of time reading other people's routes and looking at maps. Whilst I enjoy looking at maps I have got to that point where the roads are just coloured lines and I have no idea what they are like to ride on in reality.
I have sorted quite a bit of my intended route from others' accounts, but there are still a few areas where I could do with advice and/or local knowledge. To avoid this getting complicated, I will try to ask about one area at a time. Oh, and I am not attempting to do it in seven days or anything heroic like that - more of a compromise between great scenery and a straight line.
The first area I would like to ask about is after the YH at Slaidburn. My choices are either to go to Kendal and through the Lake District, or go through Ingleton and then the Eden Valley - just to complicate things a bit, if I was to go via the Eden Valley I could go through the Ribble valley and Settle first.
Apologies for the rambling post, but I would really appreciate any help or advice .
Thanks
Rick

 

[deanE]

I did the end2end last year, north/south as I live in Cornwall. I checked out a lot of the route on Google maps/Street view. Even so there were a few bits I missed that gave me surprises, like the lane in Devon which disintegrated into swamp and a sign that said unsuitable for motor vehicles. It was very useful for checking cake stops and for locating my B&Bs.

 

[vernon]

You can overdo the deliberation. If you spend like I did, seventeen days with a day off roughly mid way the route is almost immaterial if you are camping as you have the flexibility to increase the miles on flat terrain and take it easy in the lumpy bits. I averaged sixty miles per day with the longest day being eighty eight miles and the shortest day being twenty two miles in a heavily hungover state having drunk a caravan dry in Somerset. I wasn't superhuman - I weighed around twenty five stones at the time. I treated the ride as a series of day rides so my daily target was, with the exception of the 22 mile day, achievable without the payload of a huge mileage of the remaining ride to discourage me.

The problem is that when you are offering alternative routes, you are unlikely to get answers from folk who have ridden both of the alternative. I've ridden through Kendal and Shap through the Lake District and managed - just. I can not comment on the Ribble Valley as I've not been there.

I will add that, in my opinion, the A82 in Scotland is not as scary as some people would have you believe.

 

[ricksavery]

Apologies for lateness of reply. Thanks, both for your replies.

@vernon totally agree about overdoing the deliberation. Got to the point where I couldn't make a decision. In the end I picked a route and I'm sticking with it! I am / was concerned about being a bit heavy (17 stone), but so impressed with the details of your reply, that I realised it was just another bit of prevarication on my part. Your will power seems to superhuman to me!

Thanks again

 

[Ticktockmy]

I like Vernon tend to treat long tours as a series of day rides, the other thing I tend to do for route planning is draw a straight line between the two points of my tour then plan my route to travel in its vicinity allowing for slight variations of the route to visit places of Interest. so in the case of the LEJOG I would draw a line from LE to Bristol then a line from Bristol to JOG, I have never done the LEJOG but did the Cape Wrath to Dover diagonal a few years ago, and used that method to plan the route and it worked very well.

 

[ricksavery]

To be honest, that is pretty much what I ended up doing. The detours I made to the route were not to see places of interest however, but to avoid hilly bits as much as possible. Read a few accounts of other people's route choices, which seemed to broadly coincide with mine and left it at that. Up until Vernon's reply above, I had at least 6 versions on the go and couldn't make a decision!