Coast 2 Coast - best route for road cyclists

Ben6899

Hello!

Me and a few mates are going to ride the Coast 2 Coast route (Whitehaven to Tynemouth) in August.

Now the c2c website shows variations for certain sections of the route and I do seem to recall - from other cyclists' anecdotes - that there are indeed some off road sections. We're road cyclists and we'd be keen to avoid any of these.

So I want to map out the detailed route this weekend and wondered if anyone has any pointers, in particular which route variations you would avoid or indeed be sure to include.

Any help would be great; I've never cycled that far north.

Cheers
Ben

andymiller

This might be a start:

http://www.c2c-guide.co.uk/off-road-sections/

(a pity the online route map doesn't mark the off-road sections)

I'd have thought someone somewhere would have posted gps tracks for avoiding the off-road sections.

t4tomo

Search C2C on ride with GPS or similar, should turn up something. You should finish in Whitby rather than Tynemouth, you can't beat Whitby.

Indeed I think this is the route I'm doing in the summer
http://ridewithgps.com/events/C2C-BASE#routes/6974704/preview
Which is a slightly meandering real mans version of C2C taking in some of the Tour de France climbs on day 2

Ben6899

Thanks chaps. Yes, I would have gone with Whitby, but the whole thing is my mate's idea and he wants to finish in Tynemouth. More's the pity.

I struggled to stumble upon the off road section of the c2c website! Very useful. And I'll search for gpx etc files online.

(A bit new to navigating by gpx - prefer a proper map and winging it a bit!)

How Far is too Far

I did it to Sunderland last year, here is a link to my ride.

https://www.strava.com/activities/187065475

This should give you a rough idea of the route, I did make a wrong turn and had to double back but it was fairly straight forward ride. I will be doing it again soon as I want to shave a bit of time of it and perfect the route.