For us, an important part of touring, is venturing into the unknown. That being said, we do appreciate a little bit of planning ahead, just to avoid things like coming to a dead end, run out of water/food, or what have you.
Stravas route planner certainly takes us a long way in that regard, and the heatmaps are particularly useful. Still, it has some shortcomings, most notably the lacking ability to display an overview and basic statistics about select routes. Luckily, Strava have since long opened up their APIs, so anyone can build apps using their APIs and (your own) data. Komoot is also an excellent tool for planning tours, but unfortunately they have so far not opened up their APIs for regular users.
And so it became clear what we needed to. Using Stravas APIs, we set out to build the ultimate planning tool for bicycle touring. It is now live and we call it: Adventure Planner 2000.
Adventure Planner 2000 consists of two main parts; a Python-script and a Google Sheet. The Python-script reads route data from Strava. The same script then transforms relevant parts of the data and writes it to the Google sheet. The tourer will then further enrich the data by adding notes and so forth to the Google sheet. In sum, this will give the tourer a nice and confident-building overview of what lies ahead. If the routes changes in Strava later on, just run the Python-script again. It will only replace relevant data from Strava and leave user added data unaltered. See the docs at Github for more details on using Adventure Planner 2000.
The Adventure Planner is super easy to use, but do require a few steps to set up. All the information you need to get started can be found at Github. Please feel free to suggest improvements or provide feedback if you have something on your mind. Either create an issue at Github, see link above, or write us an email.
Happy planning (and touring)!
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