Peterborough Cathedral was quiet under a mild, cloudy sky as I set off at 10am, 17 degrees on the dial and Scenic loaded up for its first real test. One day into a free two-week trial, and genuinely no idea what to expect. Calimoto’s the only nav app I’ve properly ridden with, and switching felt a bit like changing gloves mid-season. Same job, different feel, and you don’t really know if you’ll get on with it until you’re already committed to the ride.
St Neots was the destination, a good halfway point, and home to Bohemia, a coffee spot I’d been wanting to try for a while.
Once I’d settled on a route type (Standard, with the slider pushed all the way to Adventurous), Scenic set to work, and this is where it started winning me over. Adventurous meant B roads wherever they existed, and the route it plotted ran through Yaxley, Godmanchester, and Offord Cluny before dropping into St Neots. No dual carriageway shortcuts, no obvious detours onto the A1, just a string of proper, unhurried B roads exactly the way I’d have tried to plan it myself, if I’d had the patience to plan it myself.
Somewhere around Offord Cluny the road dipped alongside the river: narrowboats moored up, a pub right on the water, and a bridge barely wide enough for one car at a time. I didn’t catch the name, but it’s the kind of spot that makes me want to plan a ride back just to stop there properly.
It’s a small thing, but it mattered: the app had clearly understood what “adventurous” should mean for a rider, not just a shortest-time algorithm wearing a fun name.
Voice prompts came through clearly, well ahead of each turn, and I could hear them fine at anything up to about 40mph. After that, the engine takes over and you’re relying on the screen, which is fair enough and no different to any other nav app I’ve used. Up in the top left corner sits a large box showing distance to the next junction, much like Calimoto’s layout, and it’s genuinely one of the more useful bits of the interface: a quick glance tells you everything you need without hunting around the screen.
Where it fell down a little was recovery. I missed a turn more than once, if I’m honest, and rather than quietly recalculating a new route from where I actually was, Scenic insisted on sending me back to rejoin the original path. Calimoto’s app always felt a bit more forgiving in that moment; a wrong turn becomes a new route, not an instruction to undo your mistake.
The bigger test came from road resurfacing works that closed a stretch I was meant to ride. Scenic had no idea the road was shut and kept steering me straight back at it, refusing to let it go. There’s probably a setting or workaround for exactly this (reporting a closure, avoiding a road manually) but I didn’t know it on the day, and ended up chancing a nearby road myself to route around the problem.
By the time St Neots came into view, I was ready for a proper stop. The ride over had taken about an hour, and I parked up in Market Square, just across the street from the café. A few other bikes were already there, so mine slotted in alongside them. The market was on that day too, stalls out and the square properly bustling, which made the whole stop feel more like arriving somewhere than just passing through.
Bohemia was easy to like straight away. Friendly staff, a strong Americano, and that relaxed hum of a place that’s busy without being frantic. Half the tables were taken, a steady trickle of people coming and going, someone at a corner table quietly working through a call, a couple of conversations going at once.
While I was there, one of the team confirmed my coffee was brewed from their micro roastery, and mentioned they open up in the evenings once a month for an event night that’s apparently really popular. I did a bit of digging afterwards and found the building has more history than the chic interior lets on. Bohemia’s only been running since 2016, but the Grade II listed building it sits in goes back centuries, and local history has it that Oliver Cromwell’s body rested here overnight on its way to the Tower of London.
The first leg had drained my phone battery more than I’d expected, so while I was at Bohemia I made use of their free WiFi to download the map for the second leg. That turned out to be the right call. For what it’s worth, I wasn’t going in blind. Scenic’s built a strong reputation among riders, regularly named alongside Calimoto as one of the two apps most worth trying, and its App Store rating sits around 4.7. A lot of that praise centres on reliability and, ironically, battery efficiency, which made my own experience on the first leg feel like an outlier rather than the norm. It’s worth saying the second leg backed that reputation up: with the map downloaded in advance at Bohemia, the app barely touched my battery the rest of the way to St Albans, which suggests the drain on leg one was more about running everything live over a data connection than any fault of the app itself. Reviews elsewhere talk about the depth of route customisation as a genuine strength once you’re past the initial setup, which tracks with what I’d found messing about with the Adventurous slider before I’d even left Peterborough.
The route south ran through Sandy, Biggleswade, and Arlesey before cutting through Hitchin, then down through Luton and Harpenden on the final approach into St Albans. Forty-four miles all told, a proper cross-country run rather than a straight motorway shot, with Scenic threading through the same mix of B roads it had favoured on the way out. The pace dropped through the built-up stretches around Luton and Hitchin, as you’d expect, but picked back up nicely on the open road either side of them.
So, is Scenic the app I’m switching to for good? Too early to say. What’s clear after one ride is that it isn’t winning on user-friendliness in the way Calimoto does; Calimoto still has the edge on feeling instantly intuitive, and Scenic asks more of you upfront to get real value out of it. But user-friendliness isn’t the whole picture, and a single ride, however thorough, isn’t enough to judge an app that clearly has more depth than I’ve explored so far. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can actually do, and the only honest way to find out is more rides, more roads, and more time paying proper attention to the features I skimmed past this time. Consider this the first entry, not the verdict.
