Ride Maps and Other Cool Stuff for Sportbike and Sport Touring Enthusiasts

Welcome to Zencycle. I’ve put together this website as a means for sportbike and sport touring enthusiasts to come together and share their collective riding experiences.  My hope is that this site will become a frequent destination for riders that love, like I do, long distance touring and motorcycle camping.

If you’re anything like me, when you set off on an adventure, you spend a great deal of time taking pictures and videos of the scenery and the roads that make up a great ride. I’ve found that, over the last few years, I have stored up a significant volume of photos and colorfully highlighted roadmaps with notes like, “curvy, go here again!!” scribbled on them. In the ever-expanding digital era, my friends and I have become pretty efficient at exploring potential riding locales and mapping out specific routes with Google Maps. In 2009, my wife (who also rides) bought me a GoPro Hero Bike Cam for my birthday, so that I could start shooting videos of our various rides. Eventually, I thought that I should try to put together a nice blog featuring even nicer ride maps. Since my riding knowledge is largely limited to my home (Ohio) and the surrounding region, I thought that opening up a portal, like Zencycle.com, where like-minded riders could share their great roads and destinations with one another, would make all of our riding even better.

To accomplish this, I've set up an open-source message board that utilizes Google Earth's KML files to create a comprehensive database of interactive ride maps. Registered users can submit their favorite ride routes (complete with the works like embedded pictures, YouTube videos, and place marker descriptions) in the forums that have been set up for all fifty states. To aid in the mapping process, the forum contains detailed step by step instructions on how to make a Google Map file and convert it (using Google Earth) into a multimedia KML that can be embedded into your posting. If you’re not comfortable with the map making stuff, at least feel free to post any writings and descriptions about your favorite rides, and I’ll try to recreate maps for the site. Again, our goal here is to make a large database of sport riding roads, laden with insider information from the people (you) who are most familiar with them. So, please register for the forums (it’s free!) and start sharing what you know about the great riding in your neck of the woods. Finally, a quick shout-out to my friends, John and Jen at Springhill Interactive Media, who have helped educate and guide me through the website building process. Any cool stuff you see that works here is a result of their expertise.

Keep the Balance,

- Mark