In the Altitude Diagram, the altitude above sea level (y axis) is plotted against the distance traveled by bicycle (x axis). Furthermore, the following information can be inferred from the diagram:

Road Surface

	paved: Route sections with mainly paved roads (asphalted, concreted, cobbled etc.) are drawn in a brighter gold hue.
	unpaved: Route sections with mainly unpaved roads (gravel, sand etc.) are drawn in a dark gold hue (some may call it brown ;-)).
	alternating: Route sections with frequently alternating paved and unpaved sections are drawn with a dashed line. The ratio of the length of dark and bright dashes corresponds to the approximate/estimated ratio of unpaved and paved roads in this route section. In the example given on the left, a route section with 60 % paved (bright) and 40 % unpaved roads (dark) is shown.

Points of Interest and Other Relevant Places

	Places of Overnight Stays/Day No.: Vertical golden lines mark the places of our overnight stays. Thus, each section between two golden lines corresponds to one riding day. If we stayed more than one night at the same place, a double line is plotted. The specified day number corresponds to the consequtive number of all days with day 1 corresponding to the start of the tour.
	Towns/Cities: Significant cities, towns or other localities which we came across by bicycle are plotted in a dark gray or black font. Capitals are marked by the use of a bold font.
	Waterbodies: Waterbodies (rivers, lakes, seas) are drawn in blue. If we crossed the waterbody or rode alongside it over a short distance, its name is written vertically close to the altitude line (like the cities). If we rode alongside a waterbody over a long distance, the corresponding route section is marked with a blue wave line together with the name of the waterbody below the diagram.
	Points of Interest: Miscellaneous interesting places (sights, national parks, mountain passes etc.) are plotted in green. If such points of interest extend over a significant section of the route (e. g. in the case of national parks), the corresponding route section will be equipped with a green line below the diagram.
	State Borders: The position of state borders is marked with a gray dashed line as well as with the flags of the contiguous states. If we rode alongside a state border over a long distance, the corresponding route section is marked with a gray dotted line together with the flag of the country on the other side of the border.

Sonstige Symbole

Ferry rides, significant tunnels and bridges (usually if there are at least a few kilometers long) as well as places where we had a flat tire or took a bath in a natural waterbody (i. e., up to our necks in water), are marked with the following symbols, respectively:

Details about our Altitude Data

We export the data that underlies the Altitude Diagram from our navigation app Locus Map Pro. The route is tracked with GPS; the altitude data is read out of the offline map that we take from OpenAndroMaps (this altitude data is taken for example from SRTM data). Using a Python script that we wrote ourselves, we modify this raw data in the following way:

• We smooth out the altitude data a little bit, since otherwise it would contain too many unnatural fluctuations. This mitigates for example the effect that the altitude profile receives unnatural peaks when riding through a tunnel or dips when riding over bridges (the altitude data corresponds to the earths surface, not the road surface; this only works well for short tunnels/bridges, of course. For longer tunnels/bridges we sometimes flatten the altitude sometimes manually). Typically, we use a “smoothing” distance of 500 m, that is we average over the altitude of all GPS track points within a route section of about 500 m length. Consequently, the Altitude Diagram has a resolution of about one point per 0.5 km.
• We calibrate the GPS distances for each day with the distance measured by our cyclocomputer. If we for example rode 80 km in one day according to GPS but only 78 km according to our cyclocomputer, we multiply all GPS distances with a factor 78/80. Thereby, the total distance that we rode each day according to the Altitude Diagram matches the distance measured by our cyclocomputer (note that consistently all distance and time values on this whole statistics page are based only on the values from our cyclocomputer).
• If we cover a certain route section not by bicycle, but for example with a ferry, this section is marked correspondingly in the altitude diagram. Of course, distance or altitude data of these sections are not taken into account for any other statistics; thus all distance and altitude statistics on this page only take into account sections that we have covered by bicycle. Likewise, the labels of the x axis of the altitude diagram only show the distance covered by bicycle; for illustration, the x axis is drawn as a wavy line below sections, which we have not covered by bicycle: