Let planning be the adventure

What hooked me

I plan bike tours in Excel. Start town, finish town, distance, climbing, one row per day. To fill a row I'd draw the route in Strava with Google Maps open beside it, then go hunting for a hotel near the finish and a convenience store somewhere in the middle. Five trips and about 9,000 km of rows later, I wanted the spreadsheet to do some of the hunting itself.

What I built

A trip planner in the style of Wanderlog: a day-by-day itinerary on the left, the map on the right. My five spreadsheet trips came in as data. Every town got looked up and every day was routed on real roads with BRouter, using OpenStreetMap data.

• Each day shows distance, climbing, estimated moving time and an effort rating from Easy to Brutal. It also shows how much of the day is on highways, back roads or in tunnels.
• A scan of each day finds the beds within 3 km of the finish, every convenience store along the way (and the longest gap between them), and the famous things to see, eat and drink within 3 km. "Famous" means the number of Wikipedia languages that have an article about the place.
• Conditions cover the forecast or typical weather for the dates, headwinds, recent earthquakes, UN disaster alerts, typhoon season and bear country.
• Editing works by dragging a day's route to reshape it, adding rest days, and saving beds, notes and places. You can export GPX and CSV.
• Ridden trips come in from Strava and get a trip report: what went well, what I learned, and what I'd change.

What I learned

The direct road is rarely the right one. The router happily sends you down a national highway. Sometimes that's the only way through, and a 4 km Japanese tunnel full of trucks is honestly fine, because they're good drivers. But the best days were always the ones I dragged onto the coast road or over the pass.

Elevation data lies in gorges. Roads cut into cliffs pick up the ridge above, so Taroko Gorge first came out at 7,258 m of climbing for a 64 km day.