If you’ve taken time to read the stories form our bikepacking experience, and want to follow the route yourself, or pick bit of it, here are the details.

Whilst sat bored one day, Chris had stumbled across bikepacking.com, whilst looking for my “Mountian bike equivalent of a marathon” that I was after, to give myself something to aim for, and a real sense of adventure. For more about me and my “nearly 40 time to sort myself” mission, you can read my background post and the charity page we setup for this ride.

So Chris found the Westcountry Way, sent me a link – it looked like a good challenge. Over the next few of planning the route grew as we had to think about the logistics (and really didn’t fancy getting to the steam railway in Minehead to find out that they couldn’t fit on 3 bikes), so we stuck on a section of the Exmoor and Quantock Hills ride, making it relatively simple loop, with just the train from Taunton to Plymouth to sort. (Which if you look for the GWR trains they have 4 bookable bike places, all others have 2, took me a while to find this out, and the ticket companies on the phone didn’t know or suggest)

For the route planning we went for 5 days, with days 1 and 5 including driving time (4-5 hours for us) and the train. This could’ve been done in 4 without travel time, but that would break the route up completely differently and our camping spots wouldn’t help you.

Here our 5 GPX routes for you to download – I took the bikepacking.com routes put them into Garmins Basecamp software, striped out the POIs we didn’t need and made the route. I then exported them in the 5 days files for use on the go. I used maps.me on an iPhone, mainly because it was free and allowed for offline maps. It took a lot of battery power to run this on the phone screen for 5 days (and Strava in the background), but it meant only a small handful of minor route hiccups along the way.

For the details of how it went, the first post is available at Dartmoor, Exmoor & Quantocks Bikepacking – End of day 1