Finding the Way: How I Navigated 1,600 km Without a Cycling Computer
Route planning and navigation on the road, 2020-style
There was no dedicated cycling GPS on the handlebars for the Limburg Lucerne expedition. No Wahoo, no Garmin. Just a phone, a route planned in advance, and a workflow that had been pieced together over a few earlier trips imperfect, occasionally frustrating, but good enough to get 1,600 km done self supported.
Here’s what that setup actually looked like, and what worked and what didn’t.
Where it started: Google Maps
The earliest trips ran on Google Maps, mostly because it was already installed and familiar. It’s fast, and for a quick “where’s the nearest bakery” it’s still unbeaten but as a touring navigation tool it has real limits. Setting waypoints for a multi day route is clunky, built more for point A to point B driving directions than for a long, winding cycling line with a dozen intermediate stops. And running it live all day drains a phone battery fast, which matters a great deal when the nearest outlet might be two days away.
The switch to Maps.me
Maps.me solved the battery and offline map problem. Download the region’s map in advance, paste the planned route on top of it, lock the map to your direction of travel, and follow the line. No data connection needed once the maps were downloaded a real advantage riding through rural stretches of the Eifel and Ardennes with patchy signal.
It wasn’t without friction, though. The whole thing still lived on a phone mounted to the handlebars, which meant glare in bright sun, and real trouble in the rain a wet touchscreen and a moving bike are not a good combination, and more than one stretch of this trip was ridden squinting at a barely responsive screen through water droplets.
The real bottleneck: getting the route onto the map
The part that actually took the most fiddling wasn’t the riding it was getting the route onto the phone in the first place. Routes were planned in Komoot, which exports as a GPX file. Maps.me, at the time, didn’t read GPX directly in a way that worked reliably for this so every stage meant converting the file to KML before it would load properly onto the map.
That conversion step sounds small written down. In practice it meant a bit of admin the evening before each new stage: export from Komoot, convert to KML, load it onto the phone, check it actually appears where it should. Multiply that by eighteen days and it adds up to a genuine part of the daily rhythm tent down, breakfast, and somewhere in there, make sure tomorrow’s line is actually going to show up on the map.
What actually worked well
For all its friction, the system held up. Eighteen days, several country borders, farm tracks and city streets and river towpaths the Komoot to KML to Maps.me chain never actually failed outright. It just asked for a bit of patience and a bit of forward planning every evening, which, on a trip built entirely around forward planning anyway, wasn’t the worst trade off.
The bigger lesson from this trip wasn’t really about the tools it was about redundancy. A downloaded offline map and a pre loaded route meant that even a dead data connection or a dead phone battery (backed up by a power bank) wouldn’t strand the day’s navigation entirely. That’s the part worth carrying forward regardless of which app or device does the job.
Navigation setup used on the 18-day Limburg to Lucerne (and back) expedition, summer 2020: Komoot for planning, GPX to KML conversion, Maps.me for on bike navigation.
This setup earned its keep especially on day 4, crossing from Saarlouis into rural France — open farmland with no river to simply follow.