I live in Christchurch, New Zealand and travel to Europe most years in June/July for a bike packing trip, mostly in the Swiss and French Alps areas which I am now quite familiar with, starting and ending my trips in Interlaken in Switzerland which is where I leave my bike travel case.

For some time I have had a fascination with the Paris to Roubaix race and this year I planned to ride north to check out the cobbles for myself and see the finish velodrome at Roubaix before riding my way back to the Alps.

During my planning and research which is something I particularly enjoy, I discovered the Cycle.Travel app and after viewing Richard's tutorial video on U tube and trialing it with rides locally, decided that I would commit to it and became a coffee supporter and from my lounge at home, planned all my rides to and from Interlaken over a 7 week period.

The map just shows the transition rides between overnight stops, as I had a week at Moutiers and a fortnight at Saint Jorioz in Annecy where I completed numerous day rides again using the Cycle.Travel app.

The app got me door to door from one hotel to the next and if I did happen to stray off the route (was quite often) then the siren sounding certainly alerted me. At times when I was running short of time, or the weather was not the best, if the traffic was light I would “straight line" it on the road and re join the planned route ahead.

I was on a road bike carrying a 5.5kg back pack and while choosing paved roads only, there were a few farm tracks in northern France and Belgium which were perhaps a bit marginal for a road bike, the navigation was still fantastic.

I had purchased a new android phone to use specifically for navigation and had down loaded the maps and used them in off line mode so there was no use of data. In the cities and busy areas I would change the viewing mode from “dim between turns" to constant, so that I could see what was coming ahead.

I did find though that even in off line mode there was quite a heavy drain on the phone battery, but having a battery bank in a bag on my top tube, I was able to recharge the phone while riding and so I never ran out of power.

Overall I covered just short of 3,400ks and just over 31,000 metres of elevation.

Congratulations Richard for the Cycle.Travel app which I would highly recommend and I did enjoy and find useful reading the feedback comments (especially those from Richard and HobbesOnTour) before my travel started. I will continue to promote the Cycle.Travel app where I can and will certainly use it again on future European trips.