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Comment by nroets | Hacker News Reader

I've ridden my bicycle on 4 continents clocking up over 35,000 km. OsmAnd was my primary navigation app except for the 6,000 km in China where I used Baidu maps.

So I'm really excited about the app being more responsive on my next tour.

I recorded my tours with OsmAnd and then (after some post processing) created maps like this: http://kundi.ge/summary-of-cycling-in-eastern-europe/

https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/5000years/summary-of-chi...

https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/roads2rome/summary/

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I see you went long distances along the Danube, how was it in terms of cycling infrastructure?

Pretty good. Some countries like Slovakia built cycle ways on the levies.

The EU also pours money into bicycle touring: They design and promote the Euro Velo routes (signposts). I believe they run a few campsites.

But there are other reasons why the Danube is the most popular bicycle touring route in the world: It's flat and it passes through many cities of great historical significance.

I also like to stop and chat to other cyclists when I see them and that occurs frequently on the Danube route.

Between Passau (Germany-Austria border) and Vienna, you have asphalt for most of it, with some unpaved/compacted parts (it may have improved since 2015). You need to cross the river by small boats (for a fee) a few times. For bicycle touring, checking the type of surface on OpenStreetMap beforehand can be quite useful. Travelling on unpaved paths is not at all as fast as on asphalt is you have an hybrid bike (my case).

I would add that even farther East than that, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary have decent infrastructure for cycling long distances.

you can stick to these routes if you wanna cris-cross Europe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EuroVelo

Did you use brouter or the normal routing?

I've never used brouter.

My work flow is: 1. Talk to other cyclists to find nice long distance routes. Google the country I'm in for interesting places. Google cgoab. From that I find waypoints that I want to visit.

2. Use https://cycle.travel to generate route suggestions. Compare with Google maps (pedestrian) routing.

3. Compare with OsmAnd "balanced" routing. Sometimes with "elevation" enabled.

4. Start cycling.

Where OsmAnd excel is modifying the route. Adding additional waypoints: "first intermediate destination", "subsequent destination" etc.

Or I would compare the route with the one I downloaded from cycle.travel while I'm riding.

OsmAnd can highlight Euro Velo and other cycle networks and sometimes I will follow that instead of the route generated by the software.

PS: I rarely wild camp. I often look for cheap accommodation on booking.Com, Google maps or Warm Showers. That complicates the above process even further.

Thanks!

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