Maps!

Although I'm going to buy the OS maps of Britain and the IGN maps of France at 1:50000 on CD, at the moment I am using the on-line mapping provided at www.getamap.co.uk and www.geoportail.fr

These are really excellent - and free! - but sometimes coverage of a large area at a reasonable scale is needed. SO - on Saturday I spent all of $10 in a discount bookshop and bought a huge road atlas of the UK, another one of France and a third one of the whole of Europe.

So now I can sketch an approximate route on my huge map, and then find the bridleways on my smaller maps which will give me the best route between A and B.