Belgium - Guides/GPS/Maps.

[Caledonia64]

I have a cycle touring trip of Belgium booked for mid-October: it has been nigh on 20 years since I toured or used a bike for more than commuting/shopping. I have a new bike, an Ortler Bergerac, being delivered soon.

I have guides/books about cycling round Europe including Belgium, I even have maps, but they were all bought (and most touring done) way back in the previous milennium, some in the 80s.
Does anyone have any good recommendations re Belgium Cycle Touring guides and in terms of best maps showing cycepaths (I do have the ringbound book with the round Flanders trip but looking for larger scale/off that circuit?

I am sure this has been hotly debated befoe but: GPS vs Bike Map Apps vs paper maps.

I do own a handheld Garmin (eTrex 20x) which I am not taken with in the least (diffficult to work, small screen, and a nightmare in my experience in terms of using Base Camp, uploading maps etc). Used locally, to navigate or Geocache, the satellite singal drops out overly often, or locates me 5 miles offshore in the middle of the North Sea. My dog trackers do the same, sometimes. I am not convinced about buying a newer touch version of Garmin as its interfacing was so consistently clunky, even without satellite reception issues for use in my home area.

I have similar reception issues in using OS maps on my phone re the phone signal (I have that issue in the town, generally, as well as out in the country). And with trying to use it for Geocaching locally.

I am liking BikeMap (on the computer) but have the same concerns used locally; it might be fine in Belgium in tems of phone reception/data transfer/GPS tracking, but roaming costs/data usage costs concern me.

[keyboardmonkey]

I cycled in Belgium nine years ago and took two types of maps. The ones pictured below (sorry about the image quality) included the numbering system used on the cycle routes in Belgium.

[Woodtourer]

We just came back from a 3 month Europe tour with Belgium being a part of it. We use a Garmin 800 along with Cycle Travel for route planning. I also have paper maps as my wife is the navigator.
The GPS and Cycle Travel is a great combo!

[yutkoxpo]

I'm sure you've come across this? http://fietsroute.org/cycling/belgium It's got the long distance routes, online planner and the node network/knoopunten.

You'll pick up a book for the knoopunten when you arrive easily enough. The problem with the book is trying to plan a long journey involving multiple pages. If following knoopunten a gps can be handy - it means you're not focused on scanning for numbers the whole time and if one is missing/hidden you will still stay on course. Especially handy in the bigger cities.

If you want dedicated cycling maps Stanfords is probably the place to look.

If you want to plan online I recommend cycle.travel. It will also show the long distance routes.

I'm not familiar with bikemap but any app that allows you to download the maps should work offline - at least to show you where you are in relation to your route/map.
I'd advise anybody to get as familiar with their apps/gps before heading abroad. Try them in a variety of situations - phone in airplane mode, going off course etc.

A simple backup is to "save" Belgium, or the area you will be cycling in, in Google Maps on your phone. Any places you have highlighted will be visible, as will your location(offline). It won't plan a cycle route, but I think it wil plan a car route offline - handy for getting to that hotel 2 km away even if you have to improvise the bike route part.

[mjr]

Better apps like Osmand and AAT can also do offline mapping, both cached and generated from a download (although Osmand is much easier to do that with - but I find caching on AAT usually suffices) and are a bit less inclined to send you up A roads or down non-existant tracks than Google when I try it (on other people's phones and on web browsers, to see what it's doing).

Another thing to watch out for is that Flanders renumbered its nodes a couple of years ago and the node system is still expanding fairly quickly in Wallonia, so basically the newer the map the better!

[Psamathe]

We just came back from a 3 month Europe tour with Belgium being a part of it. We use a Garmin 800 along with Cycle Travel for route planning. I also have paper maps as my wife is the navigator.
The GPS and Cycle Travel is a great combo!

+1 (but without paper maps)

I'm a great fan of mapping on phones, etc. but for cycling along spending your time enjoying the countryside (rather than searching out road signs, stopping at junctions to check your printed map) for me GPS on the bars is the best way.

Ian

[mjr]

I'm a great fan of mapping on phones, etc. but for cycling along spending your time enjoying the countryside (rather than searching out road signs, stopping at junctions to check your printed map) for me GPS on the bars is the best way.

Interesting. This year I have gone the other way after a couple of different types of GPS failure and back to cue sheets based on cycle route or road signs as the primary navigation. I find that looking around to look for the signs means I spend more time looking at the surroundings too, rather than stopping at junctions to check the GPS breadcrumbs after an ambiguous instruction. It does mean paging through the phone mapping and writing out the cues before the ride, though I mostly did that on trains or at breakfast.

My route through Belgium this year was fairly simple though: enter from Aachen on the Vennbahn and basically follow it to Luxembourg, with a short detour at junction 46 towards (but not reaching) junction 56 to eat and sleep at Hotel Lindenhof. All of the navigation in the Netherlands and Germany was far more involved - but the 111 mile ride from London to Lynn took four 6x4s! The UK sucks at cycle route signs more than any of our neighbours! If you can cope with the UK, you'll probably find Belgium easy as long as you preview the sign types.

[Caledonia64]

I have a copy of the Fietsroute - and this time the planner worked for me. https://www.bikemap.net/en/routeplanner ... encyclemap is great - they have national (F 1 etc), Regional and Local Cycle Paths (for everywhere, though other countries do not have that level of paths), and in the detailed iinstructions give the road surface.

You can upload to Garmin but since I think Garmin iis an exploitative piece of rubbish, given how often it will not upload paid for map selections to me, or give a result looking for post-coded addresses of Youth Hostels (anywhere, nor are there YH icons), and crashes all over the place, as well as not beiing brilliant even on cycle touring for completely avoiiding traffic routes when it is possible to do so, ....I really do not understand the rep. Garmin has at all as ... (and I do not like how dificult it iis to find a reliable legend, which itself apparently varies according to the source map they have used.

I have been looking at German makes of GPS navigatos, such as Teasi One 4 and Bikepilot 2+ but my German only gives me a basiic iidea of the reviiews. Falk (one of the European mapping companiies) has a navigator called Falk Tiger. Some very moderately priced. And the OS Devices which are costly. However I may just use an old smart phone and BiikeMap (plus an EU pay as you go card). I am not averse to getting a paper map and drawing out my route (as of old, following the Fietsroute. I could print BikeMap of course but that is trickier as I do not have a priinter.

Bikemap (and cycletravel to a lesser extent) has resolved my local navigation issues too (issues caused b the building of the blooming great totem to the car that is the AWPR or the A90 that transects the countryside cutting off more than a few farm/c road route, and itself even less negotiable on bike than was the older dual carriageway; a road not yet shown on most avaiilable maps).

[Psamathe]

.....You can upload to Garmin but since I think Garmin iis an exploitative piece of rubbish, given how often it will not upload paid for map selections to me, or give a result looking for post-coded addresses of Youth Hostels (anywhere, nor are there YH icons), and crashes all over the place, as well as not beiing brilliant even on cycle touring for completely avoiiding traffic routes when it is possible to do so, ....I really do not understand the rep. Garmin has at all as ... (and I do not like how dificult it iis to find a reliable legend, which itself apparently varies according to the source map they have used.......

I assume a lot will depend on what aspect of "Garmin" you are talking about. I find https://cycle.travel for creating the route, load in into Garmin Connect (web), then via iPhone to Edge bar GPS computer and it all works really well and has proven pretty reliable (only 1 crash over last 60 day tour). But then Garmin have other apps, other platforms, etc.

Last year I used on device (1030) route creation in Belgium/Netherlands/Germany and they were OK routes (not as good as cycle.travel but enjoyable to ride, safe, no problems with inappropriate roads, etc.)

Ian