How to plan a bike tour route

That's a pretty long route to plan, but perhaps a few ideas:

Get in contact with bike clubs or bike shops along the route and see if they have anything already written up or planned as part of their group rides.

Check mapmyride for any premade routes that others post publicly; you may be able to string some together to get what you need, or at least part of what you need.

Good luck, it sounds like a fun adventure!

Some possibly related advice from a "planner":

You can map your proposed route on Mapmyride.com and, when saved, do a "3d flyover" to see what the roads actually look like. It can be  a little motion sickness enducing, but useful.  I do this when planning route just in my home town, if I am not sure if a lane ends or bike path ends or whatever.

I would plan your routes each day to reach your sleeping location.  I read the blog of a couple from my area who did a cross-country trip (I wish I had the link for you!) and they had to sleep in some strange places.  Even if you plan a camp ground it might be full/out of service/who knows what is wrong.  But planning ahead would be my preference.

I am going to embark on my 2nd guided trip in Europe and I felt like I underestimated how much riding each day would add up.  I thought it would be super easy and ended up being a challenge in total.  If planning my own trip, I would err on the side of a moderate distance each day.

You should reach out to wgraves758 here on BT, he did a long distance trip a year or two ago.

Have fun!

For where you plan on riding:

I've looked at others rides on mapmyride or strava or similar sites to get some routes.

The Cascade Bike club puts on a good ride from Seattle to Portland, so you might be able to bike part of that route.

I know quite a few people who have biked the 101 from Portland, or Seattle to San Francisco. It's a bike route. I actually did stretches of it a couple weeks ago and it often takes you off the 101, but it stays pretty close to it.

My SO and I did a 3 week bike tour last July from Frankfurt to Paris. Here's a summary blog post. http://mightyriders.blogspot.ca/2012/08/gerths-do-france.html

On my bike tour to France, we didn't really plan specific mileage per day. We planned a couple of days out of places we wanted to visit and we kind of just rode until it got dark and found a campground. It might have been easier in France though. There seemed to be a lot of campgrounds and we also would have been okay with sleeping on the side of the road. It never came to that though.

We used a paper maps, the Michellin ones and a compass. The compass was really handy!

That's a cool picture of you on the road and the switchback behind you.

Yeah. That's the Col du Tourmalet. We camped in that spot for 2 nights and left our panniers at the campground for an easier ride up. It was also the day of that tour stage, so definitely an incentive to get up there.