If you have route informations about hice hiking trips, recommendable cycling tracks or beauteful roadtrip routes, but this information is only a line on a paper map which you drew with a pencil, then it is time to digitize this information to get more value out of it.
I show you how you can achieve that with a little bit of time, but without the need to walk or drive the route again with a GPS device. So the basic question you are probably asking yourself is: How can you draw a route on a online map in a efficent way?
The internet provides many helpuful tools for this task, some of them are free of charge, but in most cases you have to sign up and make your routes public if you want to use a online route planner. My favourite, which is free of charge, has no advertisement and which allows to use the route planner with out signin up, is Alpenkarte.eu . You can draw routes very efficiently by just marking some intermedia locations, the route planner will automatically select the route between the locations, based on your choice whether it is a walking, cycling or driving route. After you finalized a route, you can immediately download it as a GPX file. That is exactly what you need for your route digitization.
You have the choice to sign up to Alpenkarte.eu, then you have to possibilites to add location markers and additional route segment to your routes. But your data will still be private, because this website does not publish user data, it is merely an online software for personal route management.
