Hello FlightCaptain,

I do not use any particular tools, I mainly use the build in routing function of GE and manual editing.

first I place the tick marks along the route, the I use the navigate from here and to here in GE to get the road information. I copy the path from the search windo intop a folde in my places.
This way you get all the pieces of the road together.

You can then save the folder as KML (not KMZ) file.

You will see there a lot of coordinate blocks.

Just copy all the numbers you find between <coordinates> and </coordinates> into a single block.

make a KML file with just one small track in GE and replace the data with the one you got above.

finished is your route.

Load it in GE and choose "Properties" to fine tune the track.

The main problem is getting all the pieces in the right order...

But I dont know if this is realy faster than doing it manually

I also used the online Spreadsheet Editgrid to geocode the information from Letour.fr
editgrid.com/user/lucifer/first

Editgrid has an export function to GE (See attached file, not working with Googlemaps!)