Paper And String

I'm a map enthusiast, I have a significant collection of OS maps on the shelf and every holiday (most holidays are touring trips in the car with a tent in the boot - it's how my wife and I relax) requires buying maps of the area (OS if in UK, Michelin in Europe). I also spent my early 20's co-driving rally cars with maps on my knee.

I cycle to escape the modern world, as the blog states we stare at screens our whole lives. Cycling is my view of freedom as it was when I first rode as a kid and realised how far a bike could be ridden as a teenager. That freedom for me means not needing to take the 21st century with me on my bike.

I haven't justified the cost of a GPS unit and currently my riding is local to home on known roads. There is an intention to get a GPS at some point soon but that's an Audax thing as I get into longer rides, the paper route notes on a board cable tied onto the handlebars (map in back pocket for emergency) are proving cumbersome particularly in the dark.

Carrying a full folding map on a bike is not exactly straightforward but printed sections from various mapping software is a brilliant invention, they fold neatly onto my Audax route board (Polaris Map Trap from recollection) and can be viewed on the fly without having to unfold a map at each junction and it fulfils my lifetime passion for map reading.

Some of my best rides have been failed attempts to memorise a map. Keep an eye on the sun and the direction of some distant hills, keep turning what feels like the right direction ...get it wrong and make a correction at the next lane along. You can always cheat and get the phone out these days, but I usually end up home again somehow

Maps have never let me down & I have served all over the world and used dozens of types. Now GPS on the other hand

I do the research on M my R and print my own looping route maps for the back pocket when I go to a new part of Spain. Just three 6 inch squares stapled in order and kept in a sandwich bag cover most routes. Works a treat. Phone acts as back up if I need it.

Just read this as i'm looking at reviews for a garmin touring...bad timing but feel better with many people embracing technology. When I lived in the countryside just going out was great fun, but now starting in central London a lack of direction can ruin a ride (or lose the will to ride) and when you get to a busy A-road that's dangerous...maybe a best of both!

A most excellent piece of writing. More of this please!

Nostalgia - just isn't what it used to be!

For me - plan route on a map, or a digital map, create route & download into Garmin for turn by turn directions. I've spent too much time stopping, pulling a map out of my pocket, putting on reading specs & working out where I am exactly & then figuring out which turn to take. That's OK on a sunny day & with all the time in the world - not so much in the pouring rain!
Get the route on the Garmin & get on with the ride - it's a bike ride after all, not a map reading class.

Just me that was posh enough to have one of these then? No string round our way.

Hey, um, Cracked already did a very amusing video that covers the whole epic quest vs technology issue in an amusing video that I have cut and pasted the link to below to passively take credit for their work, because it is very amusing and they totally put a lot of effort into it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnXdlYR4eAw

Love it! I took 6 of us plus 23 stagieres from Land's End to John O'Groats with pages taken out of a road atlas marked up with a highlighter. We went wrong once near Ingleton! I think we circled the village and got back on track! I used to convert every Randonnée instruction sheet into a continuous roll of 7 cm wide paper and rolled it between 2 dowels in an old plastic box nails came in from B&Q, and stuck this on the handlebars with once-only ties - I'd still use it now if anyone issued instruction sheets with every turn described, rather than cluttering the countryside with 'lazy boy' laminated arrows!

Love OS maps. Though these days I use the iPad with View Ranger installed with OS maps.

Plot a route on View Ranger then upload to the Garmin and ride. Or sometimes I just ride to no where and use View Ranger on the phone to find my way back.

I so wish I'd kept all the old OS maps I used to use. As they became too tatty I would replace them, or when a new outdoor leisure version came out I'd get rid of the old landrangers. The old maps had notes and highlighter marks for old routes. Would be great to have those back for reminiscing.

When we're on holiday in France the missus takes a tome or two of pulp fiction to read. I just grab the Michelin road atlas from the van and find a pen

One of the best investments I made was in a Tracklogs digital OS map of my local region at 1:50k. You just print out the area you want to take and scribble or mark on it as much as you like. Stick it in a plastic pocket, tape up the seams and it will survive a few damp rides. Then just bin and reprint it when it's fallen to bits. Saves a lot faffing about with expensive multiple full sheet maps

I love a good map for C2Cing. The fun you can have mapping out your C2C in the pub with mates over a pint or two. The fun you can have at a cake stop, plotting the next section of a route. The satisfaction you have when you reached the other coast to open the crumpled map to digest the endeavour! What is not to like?

I've found I explore a lot more new roads since following routes on a Garmin. Poking around maps and plotting routes at work, has become the poring over paper maps of my youth. A lot of roads according to Google, turn out to be farm tracks, or even bonus singletrack, in reality, so the art of getting lost isn't gone forever.

For touring though, paper maps reign supreme. Picking oout a route over coffee in the moring, only to end up following another road just because Michelin deems it worthy of edging in green, and being able to divert your route when the valley you were planning to ride up has a howling wind blowing down it, is priceless.

I've never figured out a satisfactory way to store maps on a bookshelf, they always end up in a big tatty pile.

I use maps if out for a walk or climbing a mountain, but for the longer distances covered on a bike give me GPS every time. Just as I once poured over OS maps, I'm very happy these days to sit in front of Garmin Connect and plot out a new 80mile epic. Garmin's maps (based on Google I think) aren't as informative as an OS so many a time I've ended up riding along some god forsaken bridlepath, but frankly, that's just part of the adventure, and there's always the option of launching Google Streetview in a separate window to check out roads before hand.

My GPS is a very basic Garmin Edge 200 which only offers a minimal breadcrumb trail (that can't even differentiate between a bend in the road and a junction), but I quite like it that way.

Do love the feel of a map but it's rare for me to actually use one on a ride. Thesedays I try and remember as much as possible, write down a few directions and use the Garmin to bail me out of trouble when you get that uneasy feeling you're going the wrong way...somehow you always seem to know!

I was only hit by how mindblowingly useful the OS maps are when I moved to Australia. This piece brings a whole load of great memories back! Was I the only one too poor for magic string to measure route distances? I used old bits of rough paper and a pencil - placing the edge of the paper along the route and using the point of the pencil as a pivot whenever the route went round a corner. The well used maps have a lot of inadvertent pencil marks on them. A route that went all round a piece of A4 was a long day in the saddle.

That reminds me of when I used a map and ruler to mark out how many miles I had ridden. Happy days.

Loving that first hand drawn map, that's one of my favourite little training loops in West Sussex. I notice you left out the mighty Kidds Hill in the top right though! Fancy a ride sometime?!

Brittany a couple of years ago. Couldn't find sensible downloadable mapping for my phone. Bought a paper map. Sorted. Got a bit dog eared quite quickly- I wasn't cycling with much more than a vague plan, so the "trace the route out" wouldn't have worked for me!