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Planning a trip

What you’re doing, a start, and its legs: a route for each, or none.

In My trips, choose Plan a trip, then what you’re doing: an ocean row, sailing, an open-water swim, a high mountain, a trek, an ultra trail, the desert, a rally raid, overland, a motorbike tour, bikepacking, the polar ice, or something else. It decides which weather leads your trip page and which dangers we watch for (see the weather). You can change it later.

Give the trip a name, a start (in the trip’s own time zone) and, if you know it, an end. For a high mountain, add the summit’s height for the wind and cold up there (or we use the highest point of your route).

Legs

A trip is made of legs. Each leg is one of two kinds:

• A leg with a route. Choose Add a route: upload a file (GPX, FIT or TCX, several at once in file-name order), paste a Ride with GPS or komoot link, or pick one of your Strava routes. We read the distance, the climbing and the place names at each end.
• A leg with no route. For an ocean row, a sailing passage, an open-water crossing or anywhere a planned line means nothing. Followers see your dot and the line you’ve actually travelled.

Give each leg a start, and an end if you have one. A leg can last an afternoon or months: a 6-week row is one leg. When a leg has no end, it runs until the next leg starts, or until the trip’s end.

Choose How for each leg (hike, ride, row, sail and so on). It sets the pace we use to work out when you reach each part of the route, for the weather.

Tar or gravel

On a trip that runs on roads and tracks — bikepacking, a motorbike tour, overland, a rally raid, the desert, an ultra trail, a trek, a high mountain or something else — every leg with a route also shows what you’ll be riding on: 62% tar, 38% gravel or dirt, and the longest gravel stretches with the point they start at. It’s the same check Windline runs on a ride, and the same figure appears on your trip page and for the people following you, so nobody reads a different number.

It comes from OpenStreetMap, matched to every 100 m of your route, and it’s only as good as the map is. Where the map doesn’t say what the surface is, we say “surface not mapped”, and where your route isn’t on a mapped road at all we say that too — we never call either of those tar. At sea and on the ice there are no roads, so an ocean row, a sailing passage, an open-water swim and a polar trip don’t show it. A leg with no route has nothing to check. Replace a leg’s route and it’s checked again.

Changing plans

Everything saves as you type. You can change legs while you’re away, from your phone’s browser.