Bicycle Routing and Navigating Via Smartphone GPS

We had originally plotted our route today to be on small roads in the Bulgarian countryside. However, chastened by our experience over the past two days cycling on similar roads in Romania, when we had to deal with horrible road surfaces and numerous stray dogs, we decided to revise our route today to take E70, the main north-south road in this part of Bulgaria. Better to fend with trucks than potholes, dirt roads, and dogs.

It was a good choice, especially since the traffic was fairly light and the trucks gave us quite a lot of breathing room when passing. Our decision was further justified when we departed from E70 two miles before the end of our ride in order to get to our hotel, and we immediately came upon not only a dog but a few cows wandering on the road.

We do all of our routing and hotel reservations months in advance of the start of the trip, though we often modify the routes based on information we learn once the trip starts (such as the poor quality of secondary roads in Romania and Bulgaria). For this year’s trip, Peter switched to routing and navigating using a smartphone instead of a dedicated Garmin GPS unit. The main reason for the change was the limited nature of Garmin maps outside of major Western countries, with poor coverage of roads in Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. In all of these places, the Garmin maps included only a few of the roads. A secondary reason for changing to smartphone navigation was the small, poorly illuminated screen on our Garmin units.

Routing and navigating via a smartphone on an international bicycle trip is quite a bit more complicated than doing the same on a car ride in the United States, where you can put the phone on a dashboard holder, plug it in, and pull up Google maps (or one of its competitors). The problems, which we solved by extensive research as well as trial and error in the months prior to our trip, are the following:

1. Online routing does not work internationally, both because internet data access is often unavailable in the countryside and is expensive when available. We solved this via:

(a) Open Street Maps (OSM) and OSMand: OSM is a collection of free, open-access maps of almost all countries in the world (analogous to Wikipedia for mapping) and OSMand is an Android program that navigates along OSM maps. The maps can be downloaded to the phone, so are available and routable even when offline. [Sorry, iPhone users. Steve Jobs was a control freak, so the iPhone doesn't allow open-source apps like OSMand.]

(b) RideWithGPS.com: This is an online website that allows you to create routes on your computer and then download them to the phone, permitting offline navigation.

2. Battery life: We keep our displays on constantly while cycling so as not to miss turns. The display on any phone is a heavy user of the battery, and we found that the standard Samsung S4 battery died after about 35 miles of cycling. Solution: Replace the original phone battery with a double-capacity battery, and also carry an external battery that can recharge the phone en route when needed.

3. Attaching the phone to bicycle handlebars in a way that is reliable, leaves the phone visible, and provides protection from rain: We purchased a phone handlebar holder in the US, but it cracked a few days into the trip, so we replaced it with a better one in Germany. It’s important to avoid holders that put the phone in a see-through plastic bag, since that limits visibility. Instead, a separate bag meant for protecting a phone from rain can be purchased, to be used only on rainy days.

Phone in its handlebar holder, running OSMand. We added the hair elastic to provide extra security to prevent the phone from falling out on bumpy roads.

View of the handlebar holder from the side. Also visible is the bulging blue back of the phone, which is designed to hold the double size battery for extra power.

The phone in its "rain jacket". Fortunately, we've only had two rainy days on our trip so far, so the rain cover has almost always been packed away.

External battery pack, with micro-USB connector for phone

The external battery sits in the small black case just below the phone, in case it is needed on a long ride

It was the first day of school in Ruse as we were heading out on our ride this morning, and all of the students had flowers for their teachers

Cows wandering along the road, about 1.5 miles from our destination hotel in Razgrad, Bulgaria

The street in front of our hotel in Razgrad