Gareth, I would say that you may only need to justify your route if you are in with a chance of being at the front, otherwise the logistics of 500 route comparisons doesn't bear thinking about. I would suggest a gps though especially for the town bits, the garmin etrex is popular, as is the garmin 800 family.

One word of caution, if you use the 800 gps, powering it with a dynamo direct will potentially damage it as you need a stabilised 5v supply, so you could use something like a cycle2charge (see the reviews page on here for that). And you may need a buffer battery to stop the garmin constantly saying power lost when your speed drops below 5mph. Or use an etrex as they have aa or aaa batteries so don't need charging.

Good luck, and see you in Massa (there'll be 10 or so from this forum)

Last year people were required to produce a .gpx track of their ride in order to make it onto the finishers page/list.

Andreas isn't militant about it (as someone had their GPS device die and he still gave them a time) but I think it's a requirement.

Safe to say I will not be at the front of the route, so that's one less thing for me to worry about....

On the dynamo charging - I've got a 'usb werk' that uses a buffer battery so should hopefully be fine for charging anything usb based.
I'll take a look at the e-trex and 800 series. The 810 looks like it could be a good option.

Thanks, I really appreciate the advice - looking forward to the trip and hopefully I'll bump into you all along the route (I'll be the one asking for directions ;-) )

stu i reckon we could trump that second picture on this yrs bb200 brrrrrrr. U just need to find us a deep enough river crossing

Probably a general question, but has anyone found a free translation app that works offline for iphones?

....Speaking loudly and flailing my arms around is only going to work to a point....

Chew wrote:Probably a general question, but has anyone found a free translation app that works offline for iphones?

....Speaking loudly and flailing my arms around is only going to work to a point....

What about the 'point it' app?

Loads of pictures of useful stuff and no words needed

I've got Yandex. Gets good reviews, works off line and it's free.
Seems ok so far at home...