Route advice please

[Daz393]

My parents live near Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, (A16 being the nearest main road) and I live in Basingstoke, Hampshire. Every time I drive back home, I think of riding the way home.
So, can anyone put forward some routes that are traffic friendly please? I aim to complete this within 48 hrs next spring.

Thanks

[andymiller]

Presumably you're going to be driving there sometime over the winter (Christmas?). Instead of bombing up and down your normal route why not plan a couple of routes (there and back) taking the sort of quiet roads that you might use as a cyclist, then use what you've learned as research for your bike ride next year?

[meic]

I just put it in
http://cycle.travel/map
227 miles, North to Leicester then straightish to Cleethorpes. 2300m of climbing which is neither dead flat nor particularly hilly.

This route would be very easy if you have a GPS to guide you and I imagine quite complex if using other means. In my experience this route planner rather goes out of its way to be traffic friendly, this may effect your ability to make progress causing the ride to take longer than on roads alone.
I have found it to be mostly OK for making progress but having a very few, short stretches that are a bit of a nightmare.

[Daz393]

Thanks Andy and Meic.
I've plotted a route on Strava, but without knowing the roads it is always difficult to say whether it will be a good route. As Andy says, I always bomb up and down the fast roads in the car, never giving the country lanes and back roads a thought. Perhaps I will drive the route that Strava suggests and see how it can be tweaked if necessary.
I've never used this other route planner that Meic suggests, but I will have a play with it now. I don't intend to go fast, as long as I get home within 48 hrs with an overnight B+B somewhere around mid point or just over. Again, I could always try this route perhaps as a route home in the car.

Many thanks guys for your responses.

Daz

[Daz393]

I just typed in the "from" and "to" on cycle travelmap and the miles between that and my Strava route are only 13 miles difference, but a whopping 10 hours time difference! 14 hours against 24! I must admit that some of my route is on A roads, but I have tried to avoid them as much as possible, sticking mostly to B roads and unclassified ones, whereas I guess cycle travelmap uses cycle paths etc a lot more.
A bit more map searching me thinks!!!

[freeflow]

One of the best tips I've seen just recently is to test for the blue line of google street view. Export your gpx track from cycle travel and import it into ridewithgps. Ride with gps has the little man you can drop on a road to get street view. When you click on the little man and drag him onto the map all the roads which the google street view van has driven down turn blue. This makes it relatively simple to check if your route sticks to roads that can be driven on.

As for the quantity of traffic on roads I find that the smaller the road the less traffic you have to deal with overall.

[Richard Fairhurst]

I just typed in the "from" and "to" on cycle travelmap and the miles between that and my Strava route are only 13 miles difference, but a whopping 10 hours time difference! 14 hours against 24!

You can ignore that - cycle.travel doesn't know how fast you ride so it takes a really conservative estimate (9mph for most roads, slower for anything unpaved or where you have to push). Assuming there's not many unpaved paths then you can probably guess it'll be a similar speed to Strava in reality, a bit slower maybe. When I've finished the stuff I'm working on at the moment (elevation) then I'll put a user-configurable speed option in!

freeflow - that's a good tip! You can also click a section of route in cycle.travel and then choose 'Show photos', which calls up photos from geograph.org.uk - this includes a lot of path/track photos so can be useful in working out if a path is really cyclable or not. I could put a direct Street View link in if it'd be useful (there's already one for the rest of Europe/N America where they don't have the wondrous Geograph).

[mikeonabike]

When I've finished the stuff I'm working on at the moment (elevation) then I'll put a user-configurable speed option in!

Yes please Richard, that would be great!

[Daz393]

Hi guys.

Sorry for not replying sooner but we had a death in the family

I will, when I get chance, sit down and go through your suggestions.

Many thanks