Water and food along the way: know where the next stop is

It’s a hot afternoon, you’re down to half a bottle, and the café you were counting on is shut. The next village looked big on the map, but there’s no fountain in the square. Whether it’s your first 50 km or a week away, water and food decide the day more often than the climbs do. Knowing where they are lets you relax and enjoy the ride.

Ridekit finds the stops along your route before you set off, shows you where the long gaps are, and puts the ones you choose on your bike computer as course points.

Find the stops along your route

1. Open the route and tap Stops along the way under Tools.
2. Tap Find water, food & more. Ridekit searches OpenStreetMap along the whole route. On a long route this can take a while: stops found so far are saved and show on the map, and you can leave the page.
3. When it’s done you see a count for each kind of stop, the longest gaps, and All stops, a list in route order with the km of each one and how far off the route it is.

Distances are counted along the route, to the point of the route nearest the stop, not in a straight line. The picker at the top sets how far off the route to show stops: 100 m, 250 m or 500 m. A bit further out finds more in the countryside.

Everything found is saved with the route, so it’s all there when you have no signal. Get ready for offline on the route page finds the stops for you along with the offline map.

The long gaps: “No water for 40 km”

Under the counts, Ridekit shows the longest stretch of the route with no water found nearby, and the longest with no food (cafés, shops and fuel stations all count as food). For example: No water for 42 km, with the km where that stretch starts and ends. It turns orange when it’s a long way.

That one line tells you where to fill up. If the gap starts at km 88, the tap at km 86 is the one not to ride past. The route page shows it too, in the Stops along the way row: “up to 42 km without water”.

Opening hours, and whether a tap works, come from OpenStreetMap and can be wrong. Treat a gap as a minimum, and carry enough water.

What you get on each plan

• Free: water and cafés & food along every route.
• Pro or Plus: every kind of stop: shops, fuel stations, toilets, shelters, places to stay, bike help, pharmacies, ways home (train stations), cemeteries (often a water tap), churches (shade, a bench, sometimes water) and cash machines.

On the free plan the other kinds still show as counts, greyed with a lock, so you can see what’s on your route before deciding. In Settings → Stops along the way you choose which kinds show in lists, on the map and on your bike computer.

Put stops on your bike computer

A stop on your phone is useful at the café. A stop on your bike computer is useful at 25 km/h. There are two ways to add them to the course.

Pick them one by one. Open a stop from the list or the map and tap Add to course. It goes with the course as a point with a short name that fits a small screen, like “Water L120m”: the side of the road (L or R) and how far off the route it is. Tap the name to write your own.

Or let Ridekit pick. On Send to bike computer, turn on Water & food every 2 km. Ridekit adds one water, one food and one toilet stop every 2 km, picked from Stops along the way. Swipe one to leave it out.

Then put the route on your bike computer as usual. The Send page lists every point that goes, grouped by where it comes from, with its short name.

• Garmin Edge: tap Send and the course goes over Bluetooth, no internet needed. On the Edge, the stops show under Up Ahead while you follow the course, with the distance to each. No phone needed.
• Wahoo, Hammerhead, Bryton and others: tap Export for your bike computer…, choose FIT course or GPX with stops, and open it in your bike computer’s app. The stops go along in the file as course points.

Changed your stops after sending? The route says Changed · send again. Send or export it once more and your bike computer has the new list. Sending to an Edge needs no internet, so you can do this mid-ride (see change your route mid-ride).

During the ride

Tap Start riding on the route page and Ridekit opens on the ride. The stops card shows the next stop of each kind from where you are: water, food, food open 24/7 and a toilet (24/7 and toilets need Pro or Plus). Tap a stop on the map for its card; its ⓘ has opening hours, phone, website and directions.

If you turn on the ride on the Lock Screen, Ridekit can also warn you a few km before the last food (40 km or more without) or the last water (25 km or more without). That’s in riding into the night.

Good to know

• A route split into stages keeps its stops: each stage gets the ones on its stretch, with km counted from its own start.
• Your own points, like a friend’s house with a tap or an audax control, go with the course the same way. Add them in Your points under Tools.
• If part of a long route couldn’t be searched (the server was busy), Ridekit says which stretch and offers Retry. Gaps only count the searched parts.

More on the support page.