Choosing a destination for a bicycle ride

More often than not I choose a cycling route based on a location of some small town somewhere. Those places might not have almost anything special to see or visit, but I'm fascinated by small towns. Especially their history and stories told by the old timers.

Planning begins

So first of all I decide how long ride I want to do. I start looking on the map and see what my destination could be within that distance. I try to choose places which are easy to access via small roads. I don't really enjoy riding on a busy roads. Especially in winter when it's annoying and plain dangerous to do so.

When I find some small town / church / other place which seems interesting enough, I make a route using Komoot and upload it to my cycling computer. Usually it takes time to make the route so that I'm happy with it.

Living history

After everything is ready and I'm happy with the chosen destination as well as the route, I will start searching information about the destination. Sometimes it's hard to find anything online, sometimes information is plentiful. Libraries also help, usually way better than searching online.

There's something truly satisfying on knowing nitty-gritty details about a place. Sometimes you can almost feel the history when visiting a small town. You remember what you read about it and you can see those places around you. It makes the history come alive.

Something that helps to keep the stories alive.

Coming soon

So here's my way of planning a ride or at least part of the process. Long rides will require fairly detailed planning which I don't care to go through in this post.

Soon I will be doing around 75 kilometers ride to an interesting small town here in Finland. Stay tuned, I will blog about it, with pictures of course.

Cheers,

Niko

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