El Paso to Albany NY
#26
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Thank you again for all your input.
I've got a lot to play with over the next couple of months. I do enjoy planning out routes, just wish Google Maps could be relied on when it comes to minor roads, so many times I have ended up on farmers properties here in Australia.
I've got a lot to play with over the next couple of months. I do enjoy planning out routes, just wish Google Maps could be relied on when it comes to minor roads, so many times I have ended up on farmers properties here in Australia.
#27
bicycle tourist
I cycled ~19000 km around Australia in 2001 - https://mvermeulen.org/oneyear/australia.htm before Google Maps was launched and so mostly use combination of local maps and most of my time was spent in sparsely populated regions and on sealed roads. The lower 48 US states have 10x the population in the same area as Australia but there will still be some sparsely populated regions along the way.
#28
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And sometimes if you see a lot of vehicles in that air photo, that is a busy road.
A few weeks ago I was mapping out a route between a couple bike trails where I will need to go by road for several days. Did that by Google Maps, mostly with satellite view. I tried to find roads with almost no cars visible in the air photo maps, and if there were some cars, I looked for shoulder width.
Google maps has errors for sure. My condo association property is posted as No Trespassing because we are near a large school and have had a lot of vandalism on our property, small scale theft problems, excessive litter, etc. Google Maps has plotted two bike paths through our property, disregarding the no trespassing signs.
That however does not help if there is road construction because of the age of the air photo or if a bridge is closed. A closed bridge on an air photo might look open. And of course, when you plotted the route you may not know that there would be a closure in the next few months.
On the route I was plotting a few weeks ago, I also used satellite view to see air photos to double check some of the campgrounds I saw on Open Steet Maps. Some of those marked RV parks on the Open Street Maps, when I located those on Google maps I found they did not exist, or maybe existed and had a website, one was listed as permanently closed, some had tent sites, but some were mobile home parks with permanent residences only. And many were day camps for kids, not campgrounds at all.
#29
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One thought came to mind. If you are going from South USA, heading Northeast, Natchez Trace might be a nice piece of your route. It is a 440 mile highway that is operated by the National Park Service in USA. No commercial traffic allowed. Virtually no shoulder, but bicycles are allowed to ride in the traffic lane.
I did a bike tour on most of the Trace a year ago. I put a brief summary here:
https://www.bikeforums.net/touring/1...p-summary.html
That said, the downside of that route is that once you get to Nashville and that route ends, you are in hilly terrain and may have difficulty finding a good route north and east of there. There is no Amtrak route from Nashville. The map in my write up is the route we actually took, we did not do the first 100 miles of it, which starts at a community on the Mississippi River.
I did a bike tour on most of the Trace a year ago. I put a brief summary here:
https://www.bikeforums.net/touring/1...p-summary.html
That said, the downside of that route is that once you get to Nashville and that route ends, you are in hilly terrain and may have difficulty finding a good route north and east of there. There is no Amtrak route from Nashville. The map in my write up is the route we actually took, we did not do the first 100 miles of it, which starts at a community on the Mississippi River.
#30
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Might enjoy playing with:
https://cycle.travel/