The mosquitos vs Matthew. Through the night and the day I was pursued. And eaten.
Posts Tagged ‘Sweden’
I’m out in the sticks now. And not, at the same time. There are villages and holiday houses. I’m on the only (main) road. Although it’s not busy, it’s straight, long and boring. I miss those quiet forest paths.
Day 34. 171km. Kalix – Pello
Posted: July 11, 2013 in Cycling, Finland, SwedenTags: Cycling, Finland, Sweden
Today I was caught in a time warp. I passed 4000km since my start in Eindhoven and crossed the Arctic Circle, where I suddenly grew 16 years younger and met Ed (who cycled the first 60km of my 4000km). Ed also looked younger.
Cycling on and on. The next village. The next forest road. Headwind, tailwind. Beach. River.
Today I stopped. And listened. Silence. The background whoosh of the wind. A bird cry. A plop in the lake. And then silence again. Beautiful.
A tail wind makes it all good. It was a grey day but I liked it. Made some kilometres and met some lovely people.
Headwind and roadworks. The conditions make such a difference and today was a slog. Forests, lakes and sea. Harder to enjoy them today.
Boat trip with company to Umeå. The best forest road yet. My first hostel that kind of didn’t exist. Didn’t stay there. Camping ground near the coast. Beautiful day. Sweden.
Route through Finland and Sweden now updated
Posted: December 4, 2012 in CyclingTags: Cycling, Finland, Sweden
In the summer of 2013 I will be cycling from Eindhoven in the Netherlands to the North Cape in Norway via the Baltic countries. I have been updating my routes according to advice from cycling forums. My latest update is of my route through Finland and Sweden. Many thanks to fillarifoorum – the Finnish cycling forum, and to cykelforum.se and happymtb.org – the two swedish cycling forums.
I may be taking a detour through the Turku archipeligo due to a suggestion from Pikuski, and I will be taking some of the Sverigeleden route due to suggestions from Topfrog. Thanks for your help!!
Updated summer 2013 route through Poland
Posted: November 17, 2012 in CyclingTags: Cycling, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Kalingrad, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Nordkapp, Norway, Poland, Sweden
In 2013 I will be cycling from Eindhoven in the Netherlands to the North Cape via the Baltic countries. I have been putting together a planned cycle route from different sources on the internet, generating a gpx file of the route.
After speaking to a Polish guy, writing on some Polish cycle blogs, and doing some more internet research, I have decided to change my route through Poland to follow the coast, and pass through Gdansk.
Here is my new route.
To reach the coast Baltic Sea coast in Poland, I also changed my route through Germany, using a cool bike route finder called Naviki.
18.11.2012: I updated the German route following recommendations by a German cycling forum.
My route through Poland now follows the EuroVelo 10 path, passes down an amazing looking sand peninsula to a place called Hel, and passes through Gdansk.
Thanks to Pawel for inspiring me to cycle along the coast, and to check out the Polish cycling forums. And thanks to all the people on the cycling forum that helped me out.
The new Polish route is a concatination of routes obtained from bikemap.net. The main one was the EuroVelo R10 route.
Generating a gpx route for bike trip 2013
Posted: October 18, 2012 in CyclingTags: Cycling, Estonia, eurovelo, EveryTrail, Finland, Germany, gpx, Kalingrad, Latvia, Lithuania, lonvia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Routes, Sweden
Planning (at least the first draft of) the exact cycle route is an important part of the overall planning of a long distance cycle trip. Just ‘following your nose’ leads you to main, busy roads. Insider secrets remain secrets.
In the summer of 2013 I intend to cycle from where I live in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, to the North Cape, via the Baltic Countries. I have put together a planned route which is made up of documented biking routes, collected from a range of different sources. I have collected this route in gpx format which can be viewed on my iPhone.
Here, I would like to list the biking route sources, and how to concatenate such routes to the ‘mother plan’ route.
Sources of the cycle route
Netherlands
The Netherlands has a great infrastructure for cycling. There is a dense network of signed bike paths that connect numbered ‘nodes’ throughout the country. Each node is between 1 and 10 km apart, and from each node, there are signposted routes to each of the neighbouring nodes. There is a bike route planning website which calculates suggested routes between any nodes that you specify. I used this to calculate a route from my house to the start of the German section of the R1 bike path which I will follow most of the way to Tallinn in Estonia.
Germany
I generated the route crossing Germany using the cool bike route planner Naviki. Many thanks to Oskar from the Polish cycling forum for his tips for Mecklenburg Vorpommern.
This route replaced my original route following the R1 bike path
– a long distance bike path from Bolougne in France to St. Petersburg in Russia. The German leg of this bike path (along with a huge number of cycle paths across Europe) is available in gpx format on the Lonvia ‘bike overlay’ to the OpenStreetMap open source map project. Simply scroll to the area of interest and click on ‘Routen’ to see a list of the paths displayed on the map. A gpx file can be downloaded for each of these maps.
Poland, Kalingrad, Lithuania
In Poland I will follow the EuroVelo 10 bike path. I found the route for this on bikemap.net. Many thanks to Pawel and the people on the Polish cycling forum for helping me out here.
After following the coast to Gdansk, I will make my way to the R1 cycle route which can be downloaded from the Lonvia bike overlay as described in the German section. The Polish section is not completely covered, though. I used the gpx files which are from Detlef Kaden. This book/CD combination is excellent, giving route information, as well as info on things to see, accommodation, and visa information for the Kalingrad Russian enclave.
Latvia
For Latvia, I used a combination of gpx files from Detlef Kaden (see Poland section), as well as cycling routes from the Lonvia OpenStreetMap overlay (see the German section). See the section below on how the information from these two sources was concatenated.
Estonia
For Estonia, I used routes from the Lonvia OpenStreetMap overlay (see the German section).
Finland
Eurovelo is a planned network of long distance cycle paths crossing from one side of Europe to the other. There are 14 planned routes, which are shown here. The routes are in different levels of completion. For most routes, there is no information available at all. For the Finnish sections, there is detailed information given in the form of google maps. I downloaded these routes and converted them into gpx to add to my overall route. (I describe this conversion below.)
Sweden
The Swedish leg is part of the ‘Cykelspåret längs ostkusten’. The gpx files for this can be downloaded here. These gpx files outline a path up the coast. When the coast is left at the top of the Baltic sea, there as so few roads, I figured that no special attention needs to be paid to look for small cycling roads. I used google maps to create the paths from here up to the Norwegian border. (Converting google maps to gpx is described below.)
Norway
In Norway I will follow the ‘Sun route’ as described in the Lonvia overlay for OpenStreetMap (see German section).
Converting and merging gpx files
When cycling, I use EveryTrail to track my trip, as well as to follow the planned route. EveryTrail uses gpx files.
To create the ‘mother’ route, stored in gpx file format, I concatenated individual gpx files. This concatenation is described here.
Here is an instruction video of how to convert google maps (kml) files to gpx file.
Sometimes I only wanted a piece of the path contained in a gpx file. I did the editing by hand, joining two gpx files at the correct place by matching the latitude and longitude coordinates to find where the paths cross.
arctic-cycler.com 