Route advice/suggestions - Innsbruck to Calais

murcof

Hi there, I'm new to the forum and the first thing I want is advice.

I've half planned a month long tour in Europe in September. Planned the first two weeks so far - Julian Alps in Slovenia to Innsbruck (where my friend is flying out home from) via the Dolomites. This means I have two unplanned weeks so far - to get from Innsbruck to Calais where I'm catching the ferry home to the UK.

I'm not too sure which areas would be great to cycle through between these two points, so would really welcome any suggestions from people who have toured in this area and might be able to offer some advice. I'm fully loaded (tent, cooking equip, etc) on an mtb, so huge distances each day aren't really viable so I need to meander back in a fairly consistent westerly direction. I'd like to get the Stelvio in, though I think that might be too ambitious. Any advice would be much appreciated!

Hairy Jock

From Innsbruck follow the Inn to where it meets the Danube at Passau, follow the Danube up stream. At the watershed crossover to the Rhine and follow down stream until you hit the North Sea cycle route, then follow it to Calais.

Radtouren.at will give you some information about the Austrian sections.

Also the Esterbauer CycleLine and BikeLine guides are very good and should cover a fair part of the route. Unfortunately they are not all in English, but they are worth getting just for the maps. The map legends are given in English in all of their guides and with a phrase book you can get at the key route information.

The one flaw with the above route is that its the wrong direction to take in the Stilfser Joch (Stelvio), can help with that one.

murcof

Thanks very much, that looks great. Definitely look into the idea of following the NS cycle route, didn't know it was there! That could be ideal for the direction I'm going in.

Thanks a lot for the advice.

KnightWhoSaysNi

If you want to climb the Stelvio pass you could try the following route:
Innsbruck -> Landeck (Inn cycle path)
Landeck -> Prad am Stilfser Joch (Via Claudia Augusta cycle path. The path in South Tirol is nice and new)
Prad -> Zernez
Zernez -> St Moritz (Inn path. Very nice scenery.)
St Moritz -> Chur, pick up the Rhine cyclepath.

I did parts of this earlier this year. I might go back some time and see the scenery that hid behind the rain clouds when I was there.