Navigating

How to find your way? We mainly uses road atlas, but they are more designed for motorists and not for cyclists. We prefer to cycle the minor roads with less traffic as it's more relaxing. You can also enjoy the cycling more when you not have to pay full attention to the traffic. 

But the smaller roads are not always marked on the road atlas so we also use Google maps. If you combine Google maps with the GPS you can also get your exact position. We found it very useful when trying to find our way through bigger cities. Also when you're looking for a place to camp it could be very handy to turn on the satellite view to check if the minor road leads to a nice potential camping spot. This can save you a lot of time at the end of the day, when you only want to find a place to pitch the tent and prepare dinner. 

But you should not only rely on Google maps, you could run out of batteries and then you need to have a paper map as back up. Google maps can also take you to less traveled roads...When we cycled on Vikbolandet (a peninsula east of Norrköping) we thought the small road on Google map looked like a perfect alternative to the big asphalt road. But it got smaller and smaller. From the beginning it was a nice gravel road, then it became a less traveled road with lots of grass growing in the middle of the road. Then it was just a tractor trail.

But we didn't want to turn back the same way as we come so we continued. And we also traveled through some nice countryside so we enjoyed the ride. Then the tractor trail got smaller and it came to an abrupt end at an oats field.

The map still showed that there should be a road here. Well not much to do about it, just take your bike and lead it along the side of the field. After about a half kilometer we were back on a tractor trail again that took us to the tarmac road. The short cut took a bit longer time then we expected but this part was also one of the highlights on this tour.