I’ve sometimes been asked how we prepare the 4x4 routes we undertake - the overland routes. What we’re going to try and tell you about in these posts is how we prepare these routes. I won’t attempt to give a masterclass in how to prepare a route or how it should be prepared – I’ll just try to tell you about our experience, about how we do it.

Between two and four times a year, depending on the year, we embark on a one or two week journey, during which we try to cover the fewest number of kilometres as possible on roads. That’s why we need to prepare the routes beforehand, and so my aim in this post is to explain the procedure we follow to prepare for them.

It’s quite a simple procedure – it can take a long time, but it’s simple.

Firstly - and logically - we have to choose the place we want to go to or from where to where we want to travel.

This was how the extremaos first came into being. One year we – or, more specifically, my friend Rafa – thought it might be interesting to go to the Spanish All-Terrain Land Rover Club annual meet-up as a kind of pilgrimage, off-road.

That year the National, as we call it, was held in Broto, in the Pyrenees, and it occurred to Rafa that we might go from Malaga (where he lives) to Broto, off-road. Hence the need arose to find some routes, to prepare some tracks that would take us from Malaga to Broto on non-asphalted roads.

That’s always where we start – defining a starting point and an arrival point, or an area around which we want to travel.

The next stage is the most laborious part, which involves deciding how to get there. We prepare this second part with the aid of Wikiloc. What’s Wikiloc? For those of you who are unaware, Wikiloc is a website where users share and upload routes they have used with other users. If you are not familiar with it, I recommend that you visit the website and take a look, to get an idea about it.

As we’ve already said, one we have a starting and arrival point, the next step – which requires patience – is to start looking at routes uploaded by other people, to try and see which ones might be useful. We need to check which routes are valid because they take us towards the correct place, or what part of these routes we might find useful, etc.

Once we’ve managed to establish a series of routes or parts of them that we can use, we’ll then need to divide them up into stages by joining tracks together so as to end up with a more or less definitive version of the route we plan to embark on. We use the TwoNav Land programme to join the routes and prepare the stages, etc., and even to trace the joined tracks we’ve chosen. This is a very versatile programme, as in it we can see tracks, divide them, join them and, as I’ve mentioned already, trace new routes on the map to create a new track across the area we want to pass through or join the tracks chosen to make up the route.

Once we have an initial complete route, we then need to establish the stages, and these are directly linked to days – one stage per day. Linking and establishing these is therefore a simple task, as we’ll create as many stages as there are days that we have available to complete the route.

So, the stages to be prepared will depend on the number of days we have available. It’s important to establish at this point how many kilometres each stage is going to cover, and this is the most controversial aspect for me. Essentially, this will depend on many factors, the main one for us being the number of daylight hours. In spring or early summer, there are more daylight hours than in autumn/winter, and so we might find that a perfect stage for springtime may prove excessive for autumn/winter.

Another major factor to take into account is our travel companions – their different tastes and interests. We don’t all share the same tastes – there are people who like to combine the route with sightseeing, contemplating the landscape, local wining and dining or photography, etc. And then there are others, like us, who just like to cover kilometres and drive.

As I say, in our case, we’re like couriers, we enjoy driving along tracks, which is why we tend to try and cover the greatest number of kilometres possible without overdoing it – you have to set aside some time at the end of the day for pastis time, as they say in France. We calculate an average speed of 20km/hour and depending on this parameter, in spring/summer we tend to prepare stages of around 200km and in autumn/winter around 150km.

However, you always need to be open to factors regarding the terrain, weather and any other imponderables associated with travel, which in most cases can ruin any preparations anyway.

By now we’ll have more or less decided on the route and stages – we’ll pretty much therefore have the format, the entire route defined, in .gpx format. At this point we look to Google Earth – we’ll do a virtual trial run on Google Earth with the tracks, to get an approximate idea of what the stages can be like, of their viability.

With Google Earth, therefore, we try to get an idea as to whether the routes designed are feasible, we try to establish how much of it will be on asphalt, what possible difficulties we might find, or note any possible sections that might not be permitted to use and any alternatives, etc. In this phase, we also look for and mark any petrol stations close to the track where we can refuel. As much of the route will be done off-road, we may find there aren’t any petrol stations, which is why it’s important to mark any close by in case we need to make a detour to get some diesel. It’s true that nowadays all you have to do is go to Google Maps to find a petrol station, but it’s also true that much of the route can be without mobile coverage, and so without Google Maps coverage, the searches don’t work, so it’s a good idea to mark the petrol stations every x kilometres along the route.

Other points we tend to search for and mark on Google Earth are possible places to camp near the end of the route and possible places of interest to visit, such as ruins, viewpoints or any other points of touristic interest.

Generally speaking, we divide this work up among us, although one of us puts together the main route the one who makes the initial choice of complete route – while the rest of us try and check and correct or complete it with small, albeit interesting contributions.

After these steps have been taken, we now have a prior route to be followed on our navigation systems, but we’ll talk about the systems we use to do this in another post.

In any event, one thing’s for sure: routes prepared in this way are mere proposals, as once on the road, situations or circumstances always arise that may make us change the route, modify it or disregard it – but that’s part of the journey and the adventure. In fact, I don’t remember ever having completed a whole, literal route in its entirety from the tracks prepared at home on the PC.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, my intention was to tell you how we prepare the routes. If someone prepares them differently or would like to make any comment or provide any detail about this, then feel free to do so. You can always teach an old dog new tricks.