Beginner’s Guide to Planning the Perfect Motorcycle Tour: Route Guide Basics
We truly enjoy the research process of planning a motorcycle ride, whether a multi-day tour itinerary or a simple weekend ride. We love spending hours fiddling with mapping tools, trying to identify the perfect route to the Airbnb or to an out-of-town cafe that was featured in an artsy Instagram post. Route planning a motorcycle ride can take up an inordinate amount of time to curate, blending challenging roads with beautiful views. And half the time, it’s the roads you hadn’t planned that give you the best of both. But there is a process to ensure you’re on the right path to finding the roads that’ll make up the perfect motorcycle tour.
In this article, we list the best practices for finding the best routes that helped build our self-guided motorcycle tours, saving you time and improving results. And we’ll dig into some of the best tools and resources to help you in the planning phase, what are their strengths and where do they fall short.
What makes a perfect road for riding? What are we looking for?
Some of this depends on your riding style, chill rides or spirited rides. Are you trying to test your skills or prefer to take in the surroundings? Are you planning a multi-day tour or a morning out on a Saturday? However, at a high level, I think it’s fair to agree that beautiful views and twisty roads are preferable to flat straights with little natural beauty.
1. We want twisties!
Where will you find them more often? Flat geography will give you flat, straight roads. It’s the most cost-effective to build and time-saving efficiency. But we’re not after saving time. Hills, mountains, elevation changes, and natural obstacles necessitate divergence of the road.
Look for areas with elevation change
Areas with bodies of water.
2. Give our eyes something to feast on!
What elevates a road to a level of all star status? It’s the view! Impressive views of expansive nature give you the emotional experience that makes you forget, for that moment, the existence of civilization.
3. Surface: How great is a fresh, sticky surface?
On a recent ride in the Pyrenees with a balding front tire, we tried carving into coarse tarmac that’s been eaten up by the elements. It doesn’t inspire confidence to lean deep into the corner at speed.
4. Does it get you to where you need to go?
Of course, there is a practical element as well. Especially if you’re planning a multi day trip where you need to get from one checkpoint to the other. Does the route take you where you need to go? It’s no fun to be 75 km away from your next campsite/hotel as the sun goes down because you were chasing down a potential all-time road.
5. Opensight lines
This is a personal preference, not an objective qualifier for the perfect road as the other qualifications were. The best road, from my perspective, has slight elevation changes, turns with medium radius, and open sightlines. This could be a chicane on the side of a mountain or a simple two-laner, slicing through the landscape in the mountain foothills. The key is knowing what is on the other side of the turn. Whether it’s an oncoming car taking a spirited ride, an unexpected tightening of turn radius, or an overly-ambitious cyclist on a sunday morning ride. An eyeline to the other side gives us the confidence to tap our full set of riding skills if we want to attack the road hard.
How do we find those types of roads?
Some will say find a point first, then find the best road to get there. And that's probably the move if you have strict beginning and end points. But if you can choose an endpoint based on where the geography is the best, that’s preferable. Even if you are planning a multi-day tour, select checkpoints that take you into regions with the type of geography conducive to great roads.
Choose your area of focus
This is where Google Maps comes in. It’s great for high level research, selecting regions with geography that’s conducive for great roads. Make use of the “Terrain” view and search out the darker areas, this represents areas with noticeable elevation changes and mountainous regions. Secondly, look out for green areas as they represent vegetation which tends to have more natural obstacles which require divergent roadways compared to tanned areas that usually represent desert conditions or plains which tend to be flatter - although there are many dry, desert-like areas that can have dynamic elevation conditions.
Qualifying your roads
Twisties: this is relatively easy. Visual queues on the overhead view on Google Maps will give you this info. It’s not always clear what the size of the road is or if it’s tarmac vs dirt. Satellite or street view will confirm.
Views: difficult to determine from your Google Maps research - street view can be a poor representation of actual experience. Some route planners have a database of user submitted roads that include ratings on views in addition to ratings on surface condition. This type of information can really only be sourced from people with first-hand knowledge of the roads.
Surface: Maps street view works if the images are recent, but with our focus on back country roads, the Google car passes at a limited frequency. But route planners like Motorcycle Diaries have a database of roads that rate based on view, surface quality and riding pleasure.
Opensight lines and moderate elevation changes
If possible, I try to feature a section around the foothills of a mountain range. These areas will still have dynamic elevation ranges but flat enough where it made sense to clear out trees and other vegetation for farm land.
Search out water features like lakes and reservoirs. Roads along bodies of water can be great roads but also can also provide beautiful views - not always the case, confirm with google street view.
I plan the route with Google Maps, then transfer that knowledge into a Route Planner like Basecamp so that I have it in my GPS - I recommend a dedicated GPS like Garmin Zumo XT
Tools and Resources Review
Google Maps: perfect for early stage, high-level research. Because of its responsiveness, superior user-experience, and ancillary information on towns and restaurants, I use it to create the route, then transfer that knowledge into a route planner like Basecamp so I can upload it in my GPS - I recommend a dedicated GPS like Garmin Zumo XT
Route Planners
Calimoto: free version is limited in freedom to create the route, relies on their algorithm to choose the route between selected points.
Basecamp: Garmin-based product. Create your route and upload into your GPS device. Not very user friendly, but you have greater control on which roads to take.
Motorcycle Diaries: pre-made tours created by other motorcycle riders and ability to create your own route selecting start/end point then adding roads from their extensive database of roads. Then export into a GPX file that you can upload into a GPS or mobile device.
MyRouteApp: route planner, with a database of preloaded routes from users. Has less content than rivals like Motorcycle Diaries or Calimoto.
Rever: offers route planning, ride tracking, and a community platform for sharing rides. It provides curated routes and challenges to enhance the riding experience.
Word-of-mouth
This is where you get the gems that are almost impossible to find by scouring maps. This includes online resources, anything where you get info from first-hand experience
Locals: my motorcycle mechanic gave me a great tip on a road in the pyrenees, and I’ve included it on a Self-guided Pyrenees Tour
Forums: ask questions, in many cases people are willing to help. The facebook group “Bikers Touring Spain and Portugal” is active and very useful.
Route planners with user-sourced routes/roads
Motorcycle Diaries
Self-guided Tours: our local experience and knowledge of practically each backcountry road in the region informs our curated routes, which you can upload into your GPS or mobile device.
Forums
Additional Tips and Considerations
Don’t be over ambitious, especially when planning a multi-day tour. Your daily ride itinerary will always take longer than what the route planner, GPS, or Google Maps will say.
We like to keep the daily distance between 200-300 km. It may seem obvious, but 20 km on a motorway is very different to 20 km on a backcountry road.
Be flexible to change the plan. So many roads, quaint towns, breathtaking views are found by unplanned discoveries.