Bodensee Bicycle Ride with Radweg Reisen tours: Fabulous except for bad wayfinding

I’ve never been great at navigation (I cried when I could not find the controls as a kid orienteering at Ball’s Falls in Ontario) so I had a lot of anxiety because Radweg Reisen didn’t provide GPX files (they had Komoot trails on their website that didn’t match up with our bicycle tour), just a paper map! I would have paid an extra 100 Euro for GPX files that one could load into Komoot, Strava or any of the popular bicycle wayfinding apps. I would still have got lost with the GPX files but much less so and it would have given us a route to go back to when inevitably we took the wrong turn. Google Maps is terrible because it steers you to the “Rennrad” i.e. the road bicycling route when you get away from the separated bicycle paths.
- Our neighbours Alex and Sharon had a good way to do this: have the route set by somebody who knows the trails and then have somebody who doesn’t know the trail to actually ride it and provide feedback.
- Oh and don’t forget to mention the de-skilling of folks like me :-) In the good ole days, everybody knew how to use a paper map right? And coped with paper maps right?
Other than that and it raining half the time (which didn’t bother me in the slightest since I bicycle in hard rain 6 months of the year in Vancouver) the trip was fabulous.
So privileged to have the physical, mental and financial wherewithal to ride 220 km with my brother and sister around the Bodensee through Austria, Germany and Switzerland (Lake Constance in English).
Big thanks to my brother for his fantastic navigation with the terrible Google Maps!!!!!!!!!

Previously

April 6, 2020: Adrian Daub: There Is No Alternativelessness - What’s been hiding Germany’s hidden crisis?