Update 2: Trans-Europe 2015 – 8 Weeks Away

23 Jan Update 2: Trans-Europe 2015 – 8 Weeks Away

For this week, I laid down the baseline of all the towns that James Chassee had stopped with mileage and information. I matched it up with my start dates and saw that if we got to Tours, France by the 5th day (which is over a 1000 miles to travel from Madrid, Spain) and rode our bikes non-stop, our tour would end on May 8th. Which leaves us 1 month to add in days off in places like Bordeaux, Amboise, Vienna, Budapest, etc. It’ll probably take a little over 1 week to drive to Biarritz and then bike to Bordeaux and make our way up to Tours.

Following James’ Advice

We’re pretty much riding through all the towns James visited with the exception of going to Stuttgart, Germany. We are planning to pass through Munich, Germany and dabbled with the possibility in visiting Liechtenstein, which is the smallest country in the world. Unfortunately, a wall of a climb discouraged us to plan for it so we’re going to Ulm after Munich to see where Albert Einstein lived. Our route planning ended at Bratislava, Slovenia. There weren’t any bike routes available out of Bratislava. At least that was the constraint with RideWithGPS.com site. We then switched our mapping tool to OpenRunner and started playing with that. OpenRunner is even better as it gives you bicycling map overlay as well as a HikerBiker map overlay. You get trails and camping option. Pretty useful to know as we’ll be camping primarily.

Gear Consolidation

We also agree to consolidate some more gears. This time, it’s our computing equipment. We will be sharing Harry’s MacBook Air. We figure that we can both share the usage so we can update our blogs and back up our photos and videos.

Money Rules

We also talked about financial rules. We’re going to implement a cash pool system in which we both throw in a $40 per day stipend to use for shared resources like camping, hostels, hotels, and food. This way there isn’t an awkward exchange of who pays more or not. Our $40 per day limit was also agreed upon after thinking realistically what the cost would work out to be. It maybe less as our cost for camping should offset this amount. James’ trip in 2010 had him spending $40 a day and he stayed in hostels and hotels primarily.

Next Steps

My task for next week is to play around with OpenRunner and see if it’s any use. The goal is to be able to get turn by turn GPX direction to import into each of our respective Garmin GPS. Harry is going to figure out route out of Spain and accommodations when we arrive in Madrid.