That was nice. Yesterday, the exceptional good weather day in an Easter weekend with generally horrible weather, I used bicycle "routing" from my home to Kettwig and back for the first time. Kettwig is a surprisingly nice little town with old houses and narrow alleys. And the weather even permitted to have a coffee on a balkony overlooking the Ruhr.

It was no real routing, of course, because all I had was a list of waypoints. I got the waypoints through a site that offers exactly that: clicking waypoints on a google map.

Cycling along the waypoints stored on the GPS device is just great compared to fiddling with a paper map. Even in areas where OSM does not yet have any roads and tracks, it is easy to follow the waypoints route.

This site for getting the waypoints is a bit terrible to use, because the author also provides a probably nicer one for cash. The days before I toyed a bit with OpenLayers (openlayers.org) and with no prior knowledge to Javascript (albeit I am a hacker) I was able built my own simple site to display smoothly the more interesting map data described on http://www.gis3.nrw.de/DienstelisteInternet/ .

To bad I cannot demo the result online, because I am not sure about the copyright implications. What I read about this data, it seems to be ok to use it at home for private viewing. (I wonder if it would be ok to distribute the 10+ lines of Javascript?) This little app does not yet allow to click waypoints, but this should be no more difficult than integrating the maps, so I really want to get to that soon.