The Transcontinental Race has the cleanest brief in ultra-cycling: get across Europe before everyone else, using nothing but your own two legs and whatever you can carry. Self-supported, no vehicle support, no fixed route - just a start city, a finish city (they change every edition), and a GPS tracker your friends can follow from home. It has run since 2013, and it turns route planning into something between a craft and an obsession.
Our example route file is from TCR 11 (2025) and runs the full brief: 4,914 km from Santiago de Compostela to Constanța on the Black Sea - a 4.4 MB GPX with 44,501 track points, crossing Spain's north coast, southern France, the length of Italy, the Adriatic by ferry, and the Balkans to Romania. And whatever the parcours, the question never changes: where can I get water when my bottles are empty?
A confession before we start: we are not racing the Transcontinental. Nobody at PitStopper HQ has the legs for it (see also: The North Race, which we also aren't riding). This is an example - the TCR 11 route is simply the best stress test we know for a question we care about: does PitStopper cope with a genuinely huge route? But if we were on that start line, this is exactly how we'd scout the stops.
So we loaded the whole thing into PitStopper, filtered to Drinking Water only, and read the answer off the map.
4,914 km. 44,501 points. One category.
PitStopper handled the scale without flinching. The file opens straight from the front page, the route renders end-to-end, and the map fits the whole crossing in one view. Behind the scenes the background prefetch chunks the route into 150 km segments and quietly loads every category along the entire corridor - about 90,000 POIs in around forty seconds - so by the time you've admired the route, ticking any category is instant, the dimmed count hints next to each category are filled in from real data, and it all survives a page reload.
The drinking water answer:
- Within 20 metres of the wheel: 283 taps. That's brushing-your-knee close - no detour, no navigation, just stop and fill.
- Within 100 metres: 662 taps. One documented source every 7.4 km on average across the whole crossing.
The first few, right out of Santiago - Galicia's mappers name every fonte:
| POI | Distance |
|---|---|
| Fonte de San Froitoso | 0.0 km |
| Fonte de Bar | 2.7 km |
| Fonte do Acheiro | 13 km |
| Fonte do Breixo | 16 km |
| Fonte do Carme | 23 km |
Where the map goes quiet
Averages flatter. The real planning story is in the gaps between documented taps:
| Dry stretch | From | Route section |
|---|---|---|
| 277 km | km 3,519 | Bari, across the Adriatic ferry, to central Albania |
| 218 km | km 3,282 | Campania to Bari, down Italy's heel |
| 124 km | km 250 | Galicia into Asturias, along Spain's north coast |
| 97 km | km 4,417 | northern Bulgaria |
| 82 km | km 4,552 | Bulgaria to the Romanian border country |
One honest caveat on the headline number: the 277 km gap includes the ferry crossing itself - you won't be pedalling the Adriatic. But stitch the two big gaps together and the picture is stark: from km 3,282 in Campania to km 3,796 in central Albania - over 500 km of racing - OpenStreetMap knows exactly two drinking water points, nineteen kilometres apart near Bari.
Does that mean the Balkans are dry? Of course not. It means the map reflects mapping effort, not tap density. Village fountains, cafés, petrol stations and farm pumps are all legitimate resupply out there - they just aren't tagged amenity=drinking_water yet. The gap table isn't telling you where the water isn't; it's telling you where you'll need local knowledge, recent race reports, and a plan that doesn't lean on the map alone.
What 662 taps look like on one map
All 4,914 km, Santiago to Constanța, every documented tap within 100 metres, clustered:
The unevenness is the story: thick clusters through Spain, southern France and Italy, then the counts thin dramatically east of the Adriatic. And zoomed in, the first kilometres out of Santiago show what good coverage looks like - individual taps strung along the line like beads:
But are the dots real? A Street View spot-check
Six hundred map pins are only as good as the taps behind them, so we spot-checked about twenty locations on Google Street View. The honest result: we could positively identify a tap in only around five of them. That's not as damning as it sounds - a tap is small street furniture, and between imagery age, camera angle, parked cars and summer vegetation, Street View misses far more than it finds. But it cuts both ways: a no-show on Street View doesn't mean the tap is gone, and a pin on the map doesn't mean it's flowing.
The ones we did find are rather wonderful:
Real water, really there, decades or centuries old. The verification lesson for anything you'll depend on: check Street View where you can, read recent race reports, and carry enough capacity to be wrong once.
Import a monster route and try it
The workflow, for any silly-long route of your own:
- Drop the GPX on the PitStopper front page (any size - a 4.4 MB file opens fine)
- Wait a few seconds while the route renders and the background prefetch does its thing
- Set the search radius - 20 m to see what's brushing the wheel, 100 m for realistic detours
- Tick Drinking Water (or fuel, food, shelter - whatever your race runs on); results are instant from the preloaded data
- Read the gaps, not just the counts
Every POI popup shows its distance from the route and its position along it, the whole dataset survives reloads, and you can export the lot to GPX, FIT or KML when the plan is ready.
Slicing the monster into legs
One route file spanning a continent is great for analysis, less great for a bike computer. So: right-click anywhere on the route and choose Split Route Here.
Each split turns the section into its own route in the Routes panel, with its own distance, climbing and elevation profile. Three clicks turned our crossing into four rideable chunks:
From there the export dialog will happily write separate files in one zip - a GPX, FIT or KML per leg, ready to load day by day.
In fairness: a lot of the time this work is already done, because route planners like komoot output your tour as day stages in the first place. But when all you've got is one giant track - a race organiser's official file, someone else's ride, an old recording - splitting (or just trimming the bit you actually plan to ride) takes seconds.
Go big or go home
The Transcontinental isn't a race for the faint-hearted, and neither is planning one. We'll be following the dots from the sofa - but for anyone actually racing, or planning any monster route of their own: PitStopper can't tell you whether a mapped tap still works, or whether that Albanian village fountain is flowing in August. What it can give you is honest numbers to start from - 662 documented sources, one every 7.4 km, and a 500 km stretch with almost none - and that's something concrete to build a water plan around.
Download the route. Load it. Search. Plan twice, ride once.
Transcontinental Race details from transcontinentalrace.com. Drinking water data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Verify any resupply you'll depend on before race day.
Photo by Steve Jones on Unsplash.
