Michelin maps are great for bike touring

Disclaimer: I have purchased all my Michelin touring maps. I do not condone illegally digitizing their map content, but I can’t lug their atlases on bike tours. If I had all the Michelin touring maps of Europe on my iPhone I would be #stoked. They are the most detailed road maps for Europe, but more importantly, they show you the “green roads” and you want to be riding Michelin’s green highlighted roads in Europe. You probably could carry one European country on your bike, but the weight of Michelin’s France atlas alone is too bulky. Here is what I do to get the Michelin maps on my iPhone.

I use my Canon Powershot (10MB pixel) to photograph all the atlas’ pages I am interested in viewing on my iPhone. I use the highest image resolution setting (3648 x 2736) available on my Powershot. You need the higher resolution images so the place-name text doesn’t get blurry when zooming-in on your maps. You probably would get better results if you scanned your map pages but I find photographing the pages a much faster digitizing solution.

Michelin map on iPhone

The next step is to import your map page images into a photo editing program like Apple’s iPhoto. You can use iPhoto’s quick-and-dirty auto image enhance tool to quickly improve your images. Next create an iPhoto album to hold all your page images, in my case, I have an album called “Spain Maps” with all my Spain images. But this doesn’t work. When you sync your photos/album within iTunes to your iPhone, Apple exports those map images with inadequate map resolution and the export resolution is not adjustable from iTunes or iPhoto.

This is when you need to go the iPhone Apps Store and purchase a FTP app to transfer those map images to your iPhone and not use iTunes to sync the map images to your iPhone. I purchased Air Sharing from the App Store for $4, it will allow you to transfer your map images to your iPhone without downsampling the image resolution during the transfer process. Air Sharing has a viewer that will allow you to open your jpeg map images. You can use all the standard iPhone finger gestures, to move around or zoom-in on your Michelin maps. I use reading glasses, so being able to control the zooming-in factor on the small map details is very nice.

Google maps as seen on an iPhone

You might be wondering why I don’t just use Google maps. There are two problems with Google maps. The first issue is that I may not have a data plan or cell coverage in the country I am visiting and can’t download the necessary maps. Maps are bitmap content, so they are bandwidth heavy too. The second problem with Google maps is that Google doesn’t know were the scenic routes are, the ones; highlighted in green. Michelin pays people to drive Ferraris all over Europe to find the coolest routes (no driving positions available currently). Honestly, Google map detail is weak outside of urban areas.

The day after I wrote this post, Google announced that they were adding bicycling directions to Google maps. In the screenshot below, Google maps does a pretty good job of finding the correct bike route from Fairview High to Boulder High. Google map directions for bikes only works for US locations currently and the feature doesn’t work for European locations or with the Google map iPhone app. Plus, you still cannot get the scenic route information that only Michelin maps provides.

Now I have my bike tour maps digitized on my iPhone, with no additional weight or storage space necessary.

New Google Bike Map

64GB SSD Transcend Drive

Here is the challenge: web work on a bike tour. Here are the problems: You need Adobe PhotoShop and you don’t want to bring a laptop on a bike, if you did, you would probably wreck your laptop’s hard drive in one day on bumpy roads. Plus, my MacBook laptop is too heavy for bike travel  and the possibility of losing it to thief would be a big loss.

My computer travel solution is to bring just my digital files with me on a SSD Solid State hard drive. You’ve probably seen the small so-called “pin drives” that are easy to carry around in your pocket. A SSD drive is the ultimate rugged hard drive; as it has no moving parts (only transistors), unlike a spinning disk used in SATA hard drives. The Apple Mac Book Air is a laptop with a solid state SSD drive, but still the Air is too big for my bike’s trunk bag and my goal is to bike tour with only 5 pounds of gear.

So when I need to work on my web files on the road, I need to first find another Mac. This is going to require using my host’s Mac or going to an Internet cafe that has Macs on-site. I connect my SSD drive via a USB cable to any borrowed Mac and because my SSD drive already as an installed Mac Operating System on it, I can reboot off that existing system on the Transcent drive. When the borrowed Mac relaunches, hold down the option key and wait for the Startup Manager to appear, then I select my SSD Transcend drive. Once the selected system is booted, all my necessary work applications (Adobe Web Studio apps and Microsoft Office apps), and my clients website files will be available on the borrowed Mac.

SSD drives are not common place yet because they are relatively expensive per GB of memory compared to cheaper SATA (spinning) drives. I found that I could include all my work files on a 64GB Transcend Drive. The current Mac Snow Leopard OS requires about 6GBs to install, my applications require an additional 14GBs, and my client web site files requires an additional 24GBs for a total of 44GBs. This leaves me with about 20GBs for backing up my recent trip photos. I do not have enough space on the Transcend drive to include all my music or photo files, so they are left off this travel drive.

A MacBook weights about 5 pounds and would be difficult to pack anywhere on my touring bike. A 64GB Transcend SSD drive weights 7 oz and has the dimensions of 1.8″ by 3″ and costs $250 at Amazon (March 2010). The SSD drive allows me to have all my work files and software, but keep my laptop at home.

This is a Google map that displays and locates all geo-tagged Twitters that mention Senator Mark Udall today. Twitter technology combined with Google Map Tiling. Zoom in and drag the map around to see more Twitters and what they are saying about Senator Udall.

Here is my accurately geo-tagged tweet. Not so good when zoomed in.