The ten checkpoints in the order the poster lists them. Don't ride this.
The Solstice Alleycat runs out of Warwick on Saturday 19 December 2026, from 08:00 to 18:00. Ten checkpoints, ten hours, free route. The poster gives you a map with ten dots on it and wishes you luck.
Auto order was built for exactly this, so I tried it.
The checkpoints
The poster names each checkpoint by village and landmark. Most of them are easy to pin down. The bell tower is in Evesham, the bridge is in Bidford-on-Avon, and the transmitter stands on the hill above Lark Stoke. A couple needed some digging. There is no "Microwave Bridge" on any map I could find, but the poster's dot sits exactly on Hampton Lucy's old cast-iron bridge over the Avon, so that is where I put it. The well in Avon Dassett is not on OpenStreetMap at all, so it sits on the poster's own position, in the middle of the village.
Warwick is the start and the finish. I put the ten in between in the order the poster lists them, reading down the page, because that is the order anyone would type them in. It is also a terrible order to ride them in.
In poster order
261.2 km and 1,989 m of climbing. The planner puts that at 11 and a half hours of riding, which is an hour and a half over the time limit before you have stopped once.
On the map it is the scribble at the top of this post. Packwood to Leamington, back west to Wootton Wawen, across to Ladbroke, back to Hampton Lucy, out to Bidford, all the way east to Avon Dassett and then all the way west again to Evesham.
One press of Auto order
Five seconds and 32 routing requests later, the planner came back with one suggestion beside my own order.
150.4 km and 1,275 m of climbing, and about six and a half hours of riding. It saves 111 km and more than 700 m of climbing. There's only one suggestion because it beat everything else on distance, time and climbing alike, which left nothing to call a second option. Nothing changes until you pick it, and your own order stays on offer.
It goes out east first: the Leamington fountain, Ladbroke and Avon Dassett. Then back west to the Hampton Lucy bridge, south to the transmitter, and along the bottom of the county to Evesham. The last third heads north through Bidford and Wootton Wawen to Packwood, and home through Norton Lindsey. It is one loop with no retracing.
Which way round?
A loop can be ridden either way, and on paper it makes no difference. The same ten stops in reverse visit the same places, with the same distance between each pair.
On the road they differ. Warwick to the Leamington fountain is 5,157 m; the fountain back to Warwick is 5,291 m. One-way streets account for some of that, and so does which side of a hill you end up climbing. Over eleven legs the small differences add up.
| Distance | Climb | Riding time (planner) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poster order | 261.2 km | 1,989 m | 11h 29m |
| Suggested loop | 150.4 km | 1,275 m | 6h 38m |
| The same loop, the other way round | 153.8 km | 1,306 m | 6h 47m |
The other way round is 3.4 km longer, climbs 31 m more, and, according to the Compare window, passes three sets of steps. So Auto order now routes every loop suggestion both ways round and keeps whichever is better.
"Now" because writing this post found a bug. The first time I ran it, Auto order offered the clockwise version. The next day it offered this one. It turned out that when a plan starts and finishes in the same place, the planner could be handed the outbound figure for the homeward leg, depending on which of two requests came back first. With that, clockwise and anticlockwise looked identical, and which one you got was down to timing. That is fixed: the same plan now gets the same answer every time, and it is the better one.
Compare's own time estimate is more cautious than the planner's, at 8h 15m for the suggested loop. Either way it finishes inside ten hours with time for ten checkpoint stops, and the poster order does not finish in time by either reckoning.
Try it yourself
Download the project (.psp) and open it with Load Project. It opens in the planner with the ten checkpoints in poster order, ready for you to press Auto order. The event date and start time are already set.
Would you trust it?
Would you let a computer pick your route for an alleycat, though?
The planner knows distances and gradients. It has no idea which lanes flood in December, or whether the eight barriers on this loop are gaps you ride through or gates you lift the bike over. Someone who rides round Stratford every week would glance at it and tell you which bits they'd change.
And it's the shortest day. The sun rises at 08:13 and sets at 15:55, so you start in twilight and finish two hours after sunset. Where on the loop you'd rather be when the light goes is a proper decision, and I'd happily trade a few metres of climbing to get it right.
I'd use Auto order to get rid of the nonsense, and it removed 111 km of it in five seconds. I don't need a local for that part. For the last few changes, I'd ask one.
Once you've picked the route, PitStopper can help with the rest of the day. Search along it for cafes, water, toilets and bike shops, and see which ones are open at the time you'll actually pass them. On a ten-hour ride in December, I'd want to know where the last cafe before Evesham is, and whether it'll still be open when I get there.
