mapping methods

Further planning my one-day ride to Portland, I found a couple neat bike-route-mapping websites.

BikeRouteToaster was designed for GPS users, but it can also be used to automatically plan a route by clicking on the start and finish cities. I found it didn't like when I zoomed in to pick a specific street in each city to start and finish, but the route effectively the same either way.

Nice features include:

Options lets you plug in your cruising and climbing speeds, which, in turn...

Are used to estimate your ride time! Cool! Also,

you get an elevation graph. As you can see, the first 40 miles will be mostly downhill. The second 40 will have some climbing, and the final 40 will be brutal. Maybe I should try to do this in two days...

Also interesting but less useful was MapMyRide. Routes have to be planned manually, but can be saved, shared, and searched. I did a query for Eugene routes and sorted by "longest first:"


I might be using both of these more in the future.