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Due to some mild piss taking during a conference call last at work last week, I feed duty bound to ride my bike to 'the meeting' next Monday. I live in Mid Cheshire, and the venue is right by the NEC. So it's about 90 miles, which is fine and I'd go on Sunday afternoon and stop over.
But - would you try and find a route avoiding major roads, (which would be my preference) and make it hard to navigate, or just smash big sections off on A roads. The main bit would be the A41 from south of Market Drayton to Wolverhampton. I'm actually in two minds now due to this issue, and I was quite looking forward to it before.
I'd take smaller roads but then I have a Garmin so can just follow the map.
You might be able to do a lot of that on route 81 and 45 which would make the navigation easier.
I plot on bike hike
http://www.bikehike.co.uk/mapview.php
comparing google to OSMCycle gives you a good idea where is good and where is bad. You can always do a bit of satellite scouting to see if the road is really big or not.
Can you not install something on your phone to help like OSMand.
+1 for bike hike.
And major A roads are for time trialists. Unless you feel a burning need to show how fast you can go whilst being sucked along by passing trucks do yourself a favour and ride smaller roads.
Ooh, thanks jonba and fifeany, I like that bikehike site, and particularly the OSM cycle map. I have a basic Garmin that does bread crumb navigation, which I'm happy to use, 552 and 81 would definitely bridge the difficult section.
B roads are sometimes a good compromise when you want to get some where reasonably efficiently.
Yeah you don't want billions of junctions so you can stick to tiny back roads, but avoiding dual carriageways at least makes things more pleasant.
Bikehike is excellent.
I'm generally too lazy to plot routes manually so use the cycling option on Google maps and export a gpx to my edge touring. It tries to avoid main roads but will sometimes take you on canal towpaths.
Yeah, I tried the googlemaps option. there was a stretch of 20 miles down the Trent and Mersey, and pretty rural too. Could be quite tough going.
have a look at sustrans maps. I think the Mercian way goes somewhere near there. For sure, route 81 goes from near the a41/m53 junction at albrighton to central brum, mainly on towpaths. after that I'm not sure...
I use roads that look open and not windy or fiddly on the map. Lots of junctions really slow you down. Sometimes I use A roads if they aren't too busy. I have been known to ride up the A470 dual carriageway to Merthyr from Cardiff because you can get your head down, smash it and be there in an hour and a half. There's a huge hard shoulder so it's like having your own massive cycle lane, but you do have to watch the slip roads carefully 🙂