Best Tools for Bike Touring
Written when a phone on the handlebars was a novelty. It is now the default, so the useful version of this post is about what to plan with and what to carry.
Plan the route on a desktop, follow it on the bars.
- Komoot is the one built for this. It routes on surface and gradient rather than shortest distance, which is the difference between a pleasant day and eight hours on a shoulderless trunk road. Its offline maps are the point.
- Ride with GPS for building a route yourself and getting turn-by-turn cues onto a head unit or phone. Better than Komoot if you want control over every junction.
- Organic Maps as the offline backstop, because it holds whole countries, needs no account and keeps working when the routing service does not.
A dedicated head unit still beats a phone on tour for one reason that has not changed: battery. A Garmin or Wahoo runs all day and charges from a dynamo or a power bank overnight, while navigating on a phone screen in daylight flattens it by mid-afternoon. Keep the phone in a pocket for photographs, messages and the map you actually zoom into.
What to carry regardless of software: a paper overview map of the region, because it answers "where am I roughly and what are my options" faster than any screen; a means of charging that does not depend on finding a cafe; and the phone number of the accommodation, written down.
The original advice stands: ride the first day shorter than you think you should. Everything about a tour goes better if day one ends early.
Part of the guide to gadgets and power.