Trip planning

We've decided that our trip will be hotel and B&B based.  When you see the weather that we've experienced in May and early June in the UK, it's a no-brainer.  We don't look forward to cycling in wet weather and certainly neither of us relish putting up or taking down tents in the pouring rain and then lugging wet material around the countryside.

We've used  http://www.viamichelin.com/web/Routes  to give us distances between towns (selecting the "cycling" option) and an estimate of cycling times. By doing this for every day, we can see that our overall trip duration of 18 days including rest days looks reasonable based upon 40 to 50 miles a day.  There is little point in saying we'll be at town X at the end of a particular day as we will have good and bad days and may wish to shorten or lengthen our day's cycle.  Thus our daily start and finish points, obtained from viamichelin, will be noted as a broad game-plan from which we may well choose to vary our daily distances.

The general route will be Santander > Bilbao > San Sebastien > Hendaye > Bayonne > Arcachon > Soulac sur Mer > Royan > La Rochelle > St Nazaire > Vannes > Carhaix-Plouguer > Roscoff, with perhaps some detours inland along the way as the mood takes us.

We need wi-fi access en-route to keep in touch.  Elan will be using a Blackberry; Rob will have an i-phone and  notebook p.c.

We will rely initially on McDonalds restaurants and their free wi-fi.  Their websites,  www.mcdonalds.es for Spain and  www.mcdonalds.fr for France, enable restaurant addresses on our rough route to be found and noted beforehand.  There is an icon against every restaurant which has free wi-fi.

Once we have reached a McDonalds, the excellent hotel search site, www.booking.com, can be used to find and book a hotel for the night.  Not only is this website mobile-friendly, but it lists prices, room availability and hotel facilities including wi-fi and luggage storage.  The latter, we hope, may mean somewhere safe where the bikes can be stored overnight.

We will be taking a full set of maps with us.
For northern Spain, the Michelin Zoom Espagne maps are 1/150,000 or 1cm = 1.5km.  They are not contoured, but they do show spot levels (terrifying in places!)
For France, the Institut Geographique National (or IGN) Top 100 maps are 1/100,000 or 1cm = 1km.  These are contoured which is helpful.
On the French maps, each town that has a tourist office has a large letter i beside the name and this will be used to supplement or even replace booking.com.  The tourist offices always keep lists of hotels and B&B's (chambres d'hote).