Before someone recommends that poor old unibar goes via the Belgeon Ardones, Open door sore glands and the Meow bridge, here's a simple suggestion of a route between
Calais and
Domfront (Orne) - i.e. where unibar wants to go - along with an explanation of how I did it. But first:
1. This thread demonstrates how hard it can be to assist if the person asking for help (and let's be plain, it is help they are seeking) decides not to tell the prospective audience anything of any use. This latest appeal was a classic example of all the exciting things the bod planned on doing, his meeting the guys and his better half's birthday but the square root of feck all else of any use. The information had to be dragged out, like blood from a stone. Why might people bother to asist if people who ask for help can't trouble themselves long enough to ask for it properly?
2. It assumes that there has to be an interesting way (generally avoiding motorways) to go 300 or so miles from A to B in a day, starting (so we later find out) at 10 AM. Sometimes there just isn't or there might be if the person asking for help is perhaps prepared to spend some time of their own with a map, instead of drinking seven or whatever it was pints. I like beer, so cheers anyway and let's crack on:
1. I started by asking Google maps for a route between A and B using a bicycle.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/C...0815737e0!2m2!1d-0.650433!2d48.594289!3e1!5i2
That gave me a simple guide to the direction any route would need to take.
2. I then asked BaseCamp to give me the fastest route A to B. I didn't ask it for wiggle roads, motorbike routes or to avoid motorways or any of that old bollox and malarkey. Why? Number one, those Garmin tools are most often used by the hard of thinking and number two, I wanted to see where it went and how close it might be to Google's suggested bicycle route. It looked OK.
3. I then zoomed the BaseCamp map in and could see that - unless one went a long way off-piste - the motorway route was probably direct enough. The route is always going to be getting on for three hundred miles and we're told the fellow wants to start at 10 AM earliest. We can assume that he does not want to be arriving at 10 PM, so you really don't want to start buggering around down every scenic green lined D road when suggesting how to go from A to B.
Of course it is possible to leave A and go down different roads to arrive at B. Of course it's possible for anyone (but not necessarily the fellow asking the question) to leave at 8 AM and use the extra two hours to do all sorts of things differently.... but you know what you and your bike are capable of, whilst we know next to nothing about people who ask for routes but we do know when this fellow's girlfriend's birthday is.
4. Zooming in a bit more I could see that the motorway replaced, as it so often does, the old N and D roads that by and large run parallel. It was then just a question of dragging the magenta line onto the 'old road'.
5. But, from time time this took the route through some pretty big towns like Boulogne, Abbeville and Rouen. Not wanting to waste the bod's time and having in mind his desire to "generally avoid" motorways, I jumped him back on the super slab just to miss the built-up areas out. Similarly, if there was an obvious ring road I could take, I took that, too.
All really easy stuff.
6. The advantage of simply dragging the route off the motorway and onto the 'old road' is that unibar can an always jump back onto the motorway at near enough any point to make up time.
7. I put the coast road from Calais in at the start and the 'scenic' run across the national park from Sees due west through Carrouges and la Ferte Mace to Domfront only to give unibar a 'feel good' start and end, the rest of it being (almost inevitably) a straight diagonal line, south west from A to B.
Here's the route:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7lxqmk9gzmksobo/Calais to Domfront.GPX?dl=0
It was created in BaseCamp and it's hosted on Dropbox. If anyone has a Mac it's possible it will open as a text file. This is not Garmin's fault, so don't moan that it is. For some reason Mac's and Dropbox between them conspire to change regular .gpx flies into text files by adding .txt after .gpx in the file name. Simply save the file and rename it, deleting .txt and all should be well.
It is 268 miles, A to B with Garmin estimating the time at 6 hours, 50 minutes and 9 seconds. A blind one armed man on a pogo stick could do it faster than that, I'm sure.
Is it perfect? No, of course not and it's not really our job to make it so... that's down to unibar, it's his holiday after all and he knows himself better than we ever will. The whole operation took about 10 minutes, including testing the Google map link in the UKGSer test section. Fine tuning would, I guess, maybe take 20 minutes, say half an hour all in. Away you go, unibar. All yours.
Richard
PS I am very partial to London Pride.