Practicalities and Navigation
Getting to the start
Friday 19th September 2008 train and boat to Roscoff
We took the 4.06 pm train from Paddington to Plymouth. It did fine until Totnes, but soon after came to a halt. The rear motor had failed and after some attempts to revive it, the driver rolled the train backwards into Totnes. We took the next train to Plymouth, arriving 1 hour later than planned, but we’d allowed some extra time.
There’s a very fast dual carriageway outside Plymouth station, but fortunately we spotted a pedestrian bridge over and were able to get to the dock via quiet roads.
The Brittany Ferries boat to Roscoff leaves at 10 pm. We boarded at 9 and had a restaurant meal on board with wine - surprisingly good cooking and reasonable price (£32 for two).
The cabin was comfortable, if a little hot and we slept well.
The return trip on 30 September used the same route and was completed without problems.
Our tandem and luggage
We have enjoyed organising and riding tandem tours in France and elsewhere for many years. Our current tandem was specially-constructed based on a Moulton APB small-wheel bike with suspension. Its advantages include its comfort due to the suspension, good luggage carrying facilities and the fact that the tandem splits for transportation when necessary - we didn’t need to split it on this trip. In fact we had almost no mechanical problems and zero punctures on the trip.
Navigation with the aid of a Garmin GPS device and Google Maps
Trip Planning
We decide on the start and finish for our trip and then locate places of interest on the way. We then measure approximate distances (with a map measuring wheel) on a small scale map of the overall area. This allows us to work out how many days we will need and approximate stopping points. This time we drew the route on Google maps, which also gave us an estimate for each day’s travel.
Daily Planning
Usually we use pages from the Michelin Atlas (1:200,000) and mark our proposed routes with a marker. This time we used the Google maps walking route finder – for each day we asked it for a route from start to finish (e.g. Roscoff to St Rivoal), then altered the suggested route to include intermediate points (e.g. St Thegonnec and Giulmiliau), then manipulated it to include scenic roads shown on the Michelin map or to avoid hills.
This map was then output and converted to a suitable form for input to our Garmin Edge 605 GPS device.
Plotting the route actually ridden
The GPS logs the route of each days ride. These ‘tracks’ were uploaded to a PC and plotted on a Google map after conversion to the correct format.
Full details of the GPS, our method of use and the software involved are available here.
