Eventually we found a slot for our long planned one day ride in SH (Schleswig-Holstein): one of my oldest friends and I. Even better, he showed up with a third biker.
So they parked their Triumphs intimidating close to my … er … compact XBR500 on Sunday morning at the outskirts of Segeberg, pretty much half way between Kiel and their home town Hamburg.
I had set a route to the west coast on third order roads, then up north a while, along the North Sea coast. Going to the outer harbour of Husum to pay the usual visit to “La Mer” for a fish role and a drink. Then straight to the east, just avoiding the big tourist conveyor belts, to the harbour of Eckernförde for another rest. We would then enjoy the country side at the Baltic Sea to eventually reach Plön, a scenic little town surrounded by beautiful lakes:
The ride was also a test, being one of the guys so damn smart trying to turn their phones into a Garmin or TomTom. Route planning was done at Motoplaner. I searched pretty much and this is the best site, hands down. The GPX file was imported into OsmAnd and wearing a pair of ear phones, the OsmAnd lady was supposed to talk me along the route.
And no, Google is not an alternative. “Maps” would not let you store more than 10 points along the route, okay for fast routing, a joke for beautiful routing. On the ride, “Maps” would have heavily exhausted my data plan, while OsmAnd works with offline maps. OpenStreetMap data, which are superior in quality and detail to any commercial street data – period.
So tucked the phone into the transparent top of the tank bag and plugged the earphones into it. The phone then happily moved, rocked and rolled around the bag while riding, so a sneaking view on the map actually never felt quite okay. Sub-legally distracting from the road and the traffic. The speech announcements mostly worked fine, but I heard the dreaded “Please turn back” for 4 or 5 times.
My friend had a Garmin mounted, proving the strengths of a dedicated bike nav. But it was configured for “fastest route” and sent us to the Autobahn or other first order roads. Which actually was very welcome one or two times because we used too much time for the narrow roads I had picked.
See what we actually rode that day at SpotWalla. Plön had to be skipped because of time constraints, but otherwise it was a perfect day. All in all some 400 km in roughly 10 hours, lots of photo, fuel and food stops.
