Everyone starts the same way: you open the map, see a pass that looks good and draw a line to it. Then, on the third evening, you find out you still have 480 kilometres to the room you booked, and that the pass closes at five.

A trip is built the other way round. The edges first, the route after.

The three numbers you start with

How many days you have, the ride out and the ride home included. A trip of "one week" usually has five riding days, not seven.
How many kilometres you want to do in a day. Not how many you can: how many you want, on the fifth day in a row, in the rain, with luggage.
Where you sleep. Not the exact address — the area: a valley, a town, one side of the mountain.

Those three give you the shape of the trip. Only then do you draw the roads between them.

The route comes after the nights

A road that is lovely at noon becomes a problem at seven in the evening, when you still have a hundred kilometres left and nowhere to stop. That is why the nights go in first: you choose the areas you want to sleep in, then link them with the roads you like.

The trip planner is built in that order: you draw the route or take a suggestion through passes and viewpoints, split it into days, then choose a place to sleep for each evening. If someone has sent you a GPX file, you open it and see which places sit along it.

Leave room for what you did not plan

One spare day for every five. It goes on weather, on a puncture, or on a place you want one more night in.
Two free hours in every day. They are never wasted: a closed road, a long coffee or a detour will eat them.
An alternative for every high pass. Until June and from October on, a pass can close without telling anyone.

What to check before you fix the trip

Whether the passes on the route are open in your dates.
Whether you need a vignette, tunnel tolls or a ferry crossing.
Whether a public holiday falls somewhere on the way and shuts everything.
Where the nearest workshop is on each day — not because the bike will break, but so you know which way you turn if it does.

A good route is not the one with the most hairpins per kilometre. It is the one you finish at the hour you meant to, with the bike under a roof and an appetite for tomorrow.

If you ride it and find a guesthouse that welcomes riders, a workshop that got you out of trouble or a stop worth the detour, put it on the map. The next rider through is looking for exactly that, right then.