Frequently Asked Questions

A lot of people have e-mailed us, asking general questions about cycle touring, we therefore thought that an FAQ section might be useful to anyone considering taking up or are new to cycle touring. Obviously these are our opinions based on our own personal experiences, remember there is no right or wrong way to cycle tour, do it your way and be happy!

If you have any questions that are not covered on this site please feel free to contact usand we will try and answer your questions.

Well this very much depends on your philosophy of cycle touring, your physical fitness and the terrain that you are cycling through. My wife and I see cycle touring as a means of exploring a country and therefore don't tend to hack it along, we like to take in the sights and enjoy the ride. Therefore we average 35 - 40 miles in a day, with an average speed of about 8-9mph. This is about 4-5 hrs in the saddle, we aim to get away from the campsite at about 9-9.30am and camp around 4 - 5pm this gives us plenty of time for stops and sightseeing. The terrain and weather will play a crucial part in the distance that you can cover, in Holland on the flat cycle routes, you can easily cover 50+ miles in a day with an average speed of 12-13mph especially with a tale wind!, however if the wind is strong and against you you can easily be down to an average 5mph! In Eastern Germany we were only covering 25 - 30 miles a day due to the cobbled roads.

You don't have to be super fit to go cycle touring, you need to be of an average fitness. Obviously the fitter you are the easier and less tiring it will be and the more you will enjoy it. We don't do any specific training before we go, apart from a few day bike rides at weekends and a practice fully laden over nighter a couple of weeks before hand, just to make sure we have all the gear sorted.

This is always the big question, we have seen all sorts of different types of bikes used for touring. There have been road bikes, racing bikes, hybrids, tandems, mountain bikes, recumbents, even a group of teenagers with small wheeled shopper bikes! As yet I haven't seen anyone using a delivery boys bike or a converted ice cream sellers trike, but you never know! There are people who have toured on unicycles, so I suppose that you could say that you could use just about any type of bike.

However bikes are generally designed for particular type or style of riding, e.g. a racer requires a light weight frame with a tight geometry for power and high ratio gears to go fast, where as a tourer will have a more open geometry and lower ratio gears to shift a laden bike up hills.

To work out you bike size go and discuss you needs with a good bike shop or have a look at Sheldon Brown's 'Theory of Bike sizing'.

These links below are worth a look, but remember they are race orientated and a touring geometry is less tight:

- Bikefitting.com : A Dutch enterprise which specializes in the development of measuring systems for the bicycle market.
- Wrench Science : They have a fit system calculator.
- Competitive Cyclist : They also have a fit calculator.

If there is one thing that will get discussions going on the touring sections of cycle forums is the question of 'What is the best bike for touring?, should it have a Steel or Aluminium frame, should you use drop, flat or butterfly handle bars etc. All I will say is remember that you do get what you pay for, our first bikes cost us £199 each. We weren't sure if we would like cycle touring and couldn't afford a large outlay at the time but they got us started. However the low specifications of the components meant that they weren't up to the rigours of touring and we spent a lot of time in bike shops getting them repaired! There are some very good touring bikes out on the market these days and I wouldn't like to single out one particular bike or manufacturer, if you are paying some where around £700 - £800, you should be getting a good touring bike. Obviously there are more expensive models but then it's probably like the difference between a VW Passat SE and a Rolls Royce! Remember it's not the bike you ride but the fact that you are out there touring that counts!

Well this is an interesting one. There are some I know who plan every last detail from the start knowing exactly where they will be on day 7 and day 14 etc., this is fine and good idea if you are short of time or on a tight budget. For us we tend to be a bit laid back in our attitude to route planning and prefer a more flexible approach.

Before we go, we will start by deciding on the area that we wish to tour in and sort out either a ferry crossing or flights to get us there and back. After that we generally do a bit of homework by buying either a 'Lonely planets' or 'Rough guide' to do some general reading up on the areas we will be touring in to see which places of interests we would like to visit. We then decide on a rough idea of a route with a start point and an end point, but then leave the finer points of the route to be made up each day as we go along.

We like this flexible approach, as we can vary the route according to the weather conditions, stop for several days if we find the area interesting or put the bikes on a train or a bus and move to a different area if the area is either uninteresting or unsuitable for touring. If you do take this approach then you do need to have at the back of your mind a 'what if?' back up plan - e.g. when we did the Poland tour we thought it would take us only one week to cross northern Germany, it in fact took us two weeks because of the cobbled roads. This left us with less time in Poland, we therefore changed the plan from cycling all the way back to Hamburg to catching a train from Frankfurt Oder, obviously this had a cost implication and this needs to budgeted for when you plan.

6. Cycle security whilst sightseeing?

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We have often left our touring bikes and gone off shopping or sightseeing and had no problems with the bikes being interfered with or anything been stolen. May be we have been lucky! Depending on the location and country you can take some simple precautions which to a certain extent are common sense:

Park your bikes in full view in a busy street, preferably a pedestrian area where there is a constant passing of people and lock them to something solid.
Keep all the really valuables money, passports, cameras etc. in a barbag which you can take off and take with you.
Remove temptation, pop anything easily removed such as pumps, lights, milo's etc. inside your panniers. Don't make them look inviting, our rear panniers are used as washing lines and usually have our towels or socks drying on the back, a couple of rank smelly socks might do the trick!
Panniers are quite quick to remove, therefore buy a couple of wire locks (you can find them on the stands in shops that have holiday stuff,travel plugs etc.) these are quite light in weight, it wont stop someone opening them but it might stop the opportunist casually wandering off with them.
In Holland in the larger towns there is usually secure parking places for bikes, just ask at the tourist information office. Some museums, Art galleries have cloak rooms where for a small fee you can leave luggage while you visit. In some cities you could use the left luggage lockers at railway stations to store your panniers, we did this in Helsinki and then use the bikes to tour around the sights un laden.

Lastly make sure you have good insurance, so that you can leave them with some peace of mind and enjoy your sightseeing!

Yes we have considered it, there are a lot of cycle tourers who use them and swear by them. As far as carrying heavy loads they are very good and it does mean you could use a road or race bike. We decided against using one for the following reasons:

Although I have no experience of towing trailers, I think if I were to go for a trailer I would opt for the the single wheel type such as the Bob Yak trailer. Simply because if you did have to cope with obstacles, being narrower it would be easier to manoeuvre. Also there is only one wheel to have a problem with!

We often go on cycle tours of 4 week duration, so we understand the problems of washing clothes and personal hygiene. For most of the time we use campsites with facilities and therefore things aren't too difficult to cope with. We usually carry 2 pairs of cycling shorts and tops, which we usually make stretch for 2 days or so. If the weather has been hot and we have sweated a lot, then after our shower on arrival at the campsite we would wash them out in a sink and hang them up to dry in the late evening sun and then hang on a line in the inner tent over night. We use 'Coolmax' tops as these dry out quite quickly, and are usually dry by the morning, if they haven't dried over night we put them over our rear panniers under the straps and they dry as we cycle along. We do wear underwear with our cycling shorts and change them on a daily basis. Then after 4 or 5 days we look for a campsite with laundry facilities that includes a dryer and give everything a good wash.

If you are wild camping and you are organised you can still wash clothes and yourselves without too much bother. We carry a folding water bucket made by Ortlieb and a small 9"square off an old travel towel which we use as a flannel. You only need to heat up a small amount of water enough to add to the bucket of water to take the chill off it, we then have what my mum calls 'an up and a downer' strip wash with the flannel (we have a fairly large vestibule awning to our tent which makes this easier). This is enough to freshen us up and wash away any sweat from the days cycling. We also use the bucket to wash out the cycling tops if necessary. If we do wild camp it is generally only for about 2 nights on the trot and then we find a campsite for a good shower.

There are shower attachments made by manufacturers that fit to their water carriers. I personally haven't fancied this as it does require you to heat up a lot of water, find a suitable tree to hang it on, a secluded spot to bear all (although you could wear a swimming costume) and cope with possible mosquito attack and cold winds, which if you wet your whole body and with any sort of wind chill factor, could make you very cold indeed!

As far as towels are concerned we take a pack towel, ordinary towels although effective at drying, are too heavy to carry and take too long to dry out. We have tried various makes and types and the best we have found so far are the Lifeventure softfibre trek towels. They feel nice, dry you well, dry reasonably quickly and don't go rank as quickly as some of the others do. When we shower we try and shake of as much water as possible before using the towel. If there are hot air dryers in the wash areas, we use them to dry our hair. The towels are hung up in the tent over night to dry, when we use them again in the morning, we thread them through the straps on our rear panniers to dry as we cycle along and put them away once they are dry.

I personally haven't gone down the GPS route, although I have considered it and looked into it, but there have always been more important things to spend my money on.

Currently there is a big explosion of GPS navigation products on the market, from in car navigation systems, hand held GPS and electronic maps on CD ROMS that you can print off from your PC and link into your GPS. I think GPS has it's place and I would suspect that they are quite useful for in car navigation within large conurbations in an area you don't know. Certainly the seem much safer than some drivers I have seen driving and trying to read a map at the same time!

However for cycle touring I'm not sure that they are that appropriate, let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of a hand held or PDA GPS over paper maps:

1. The GPS shows you where you are at all times, with an on screen map of where you are.
2. Your route can be programmed in and the GPS will navigate for you.
3. Easy street by street navigation in cities and towns complete with street names.
4. Ability to zoom in and out of scales.
5. No need to keep changing the map over.
6. No need to keep buying maps as you move areas. If you are traveling across many countries you will end up with a lot of paper maps which you will then have to carry (we actually mail our maps home).
7. You can add 'way marks' so that you can have a record of where you went.
8. A GPS will give you an accurate calculation of your distance traveled and the height climbed if you are cycling in mountainous areas.

1. When cycling it isn't difficult to navigate if you can read a map, therefore I know where I am at any time and only occasionally have I been 'temporarily un aware of my exact position' !:-D
2. Navigating by a paper map is a good mental challenge, GPS takes all the fun out of it.
3. GPS needs batteries, these are expensive to keep replacing and not very environmentally friendly. You could use rechargeable's, but then you would have to charge them probably each night at the camp site, not easy if you are wild camping.
4. Initial cost of the GPS and electronic maps against the cost of paper maps.
5. As far as I can see having looked at the electronic maps currently available, very few of them include information on cycle routes and cycle lanes, which are included on a lot of paper maps.
6. Route planning is a lot easier on a paper map than on a GPS with it's small screen.
7. It's quite easy to pencil in the route at the end of the day if you want a record of your route.
8. We have cycle computers which tell us how far we've traveled and average speeds.
9. Navigating in large towns or cities can be difficult on large scale maps as no street names are shown, but as my Grandfather always said 'You've got a tongue in your head, well use it!'. We often ask for directions and it's a good way to improve your language skills and meet the locals!

As a qualified mountain leader and keen orienteer I believe that I have very good navigational skills and therefore don't really see the need for a GPS for navigation, the only thing that attracts me to them is their ability to record your tour data of routes, distances and heights climbed for later analysis. I suppose I'm also a little of the 'Old school' and that GPS is all well and good but you must not rely on them as the batteries can fail at any time. There is no substitute for developing and having good map to terrain navigation skills.

But theses are just my personal feelings, if you see the need for a GPS then go ahead and get one and enjoy using it. I certainly have friends with them and they enjoy using them. Mark of the 'End to End on Two Wheels site has used a GPS on various tours and has some good information on using them here.

As far as France is concerned we haven't included it in the site as we haven't as yet actually cycle toured there. We felt it right that we should only put information on the site from the countries that we have actually cycle toured in. The reason we haven't cycled in France is that we used to go there a lot mountaineering and skiing, therefore when we started cycle touring we decided to tour in countries that were new personally to us. Certainly France is a great touring country and we will at some stage do a tour there.

Well it's whether you want comfort or to save weight, some might say that you sleep slightly curled up and therefore your can get away with a three quarter length thermarest. It also depends on how tall you are, personally I'm 6'2" and have used a three quarter length thermarest and still found my feet were off the bottom and I had to put spare clothes under my feet to keep them off the cold ground. Another consideration for us is that we carry the Thermarest chair kits and the full length Thermarests make better chairs! To some it up, it's comfort over a bit of extra weight and personally a good night sleep is very important, therefore I'd rather carry that little bit of extra weight.

Certainly I would recommend them for cycle touring as they can help tremendously in making the most efficient use of the thrust from you legs as you can deliver power on the up stroke as well as the down stroke. Also cycling shoes are that that bit stiffer in the sole and can also help transfer the force from you legs to the pedals. The whole system means you are being more efficient in your cycling and that helps to stop you from getting cycling fatigue too early in your journey.

We have been using the SPD system for the last 5 years and wouldn't cycle without them, certainly we wouldn't have got up some of the hills in Norway or Ireland without them.

The version we use are the Shimano PD-M324 SPD, this has a SPD on one side and a normal recreational pedal on the other. The advantages of this combination are, that sometimes in congested traffic in towns and cities where you need to continually put a foot down, you don't have to be clipped in and also it means you can use shoes or sandals that don't have cleats.

The SPD system is quite easy to get used to, it just takes a slight twist of the foot to release the cleat. After a short while you soon get used to doing it automatically when you stop. You can easily adjust the amount of force that is required to remove the cleats and as you will be touring and not racing I suggest that you set them fairly slack (certainly to begin with) as this will still give you the benefits but they will easily pop out should you forget! Having them slack also allows the shoe to rotate slightly, which can help to remove any potential knee problems that could be associated with having the foot locked in one position for a long length of time.

One thing to remember is that on some cycling shoes the cleat can stick out from the sole and this can make for interesting walking and people can certainly hear you coming! As we like to 'play tourist' on occasions and go for the occasional walks without the bikes, we use a touring shoe that has a reasonable tread, is fairly comfortable to walk in and where the cleat is set fairly well into the sole. My wife has a pair of Shimano MO21 touring shoes and I have a pair of Carnac Free rides.

As of 2004 Giant in there wisdom stopped supplying the UK market with the 'Expedition', for what reasons I don't know. As of early 2007 they are still available on the continent and now come in 6 varying flavours with differing specifications. The current top model has specs similar to ours, but with straight bars instead of the butterfly bars. It has the same AluxX 6061 frame, however the frame geometry is slightly changed with a more raked down top tube. You can view the range on the Dutch site here.

You may find a UK Giant dealer who may be able to import them for you or you could take a trip to Holland to get one. There is a good bike shop in the Hook van Holland called 'Tweewielers & Sport Profile' who used to stocks them! Tel: 00-31-174-382318

Bike bags are always a bit of a problem, there are some who prefer not to use them and you have probably read our bit on the advantages and disadvantages on this page. Our bags are rather cumbersome and there is no way that we could contemplate carrying them on the bikes.

When we flew to Helsinki for our Finland tour and to Bodø for our last Norwegian tour we stayed our first and last nights at an hotel which we had booked in advance. When I booked I managed to negotiate that we could leave our bike bags at the hotels, this they kindly agreed to at no extra charge (they were stored in a locked room usually set aside for luggage).

The Helsinki hotel was an airport hotel and had it's own courtesy transfer minibus which took us and the bike bags to and from the airport. At Bodø the hotel was in town and didn't have it's own courtesy transfer minibus so I just went out to the taxi rank at the airport and found a taxi firm with a minibus to take us to the hotel.

Using a hotel to store your bike bags does mean that you will need to arrange a circular tour and it does mean incurring the extra expense of a couple of nights in a hotel. However we do look at these as our bit of luxury, as after so many nights camping it is nice to have the luxury of a comfortable bed and a shower with fluffy clean towels!

If you don't want to use an hotel you could also try using a local campsite, as when we were at the campsite at Bodø one of the German lads we met had stored his bike bag with the campsite owner.

We have never done it but we have heard of people who when not doing a circular route have packaged up there bike bags at the point of arrival and send them 'Post Restante' to a Post office at the town of their departure. If you do wish to do this you would need to check up with the postal service of the country you intend to tour in to find out how long they will hold on to the parcels for before they are returned to the sender and the costs etc.

At the campsite each bike is locked by it's own Dutch style AXA wheel lock and we then lock them using a long cable that goes through the two bikes usually through the frame and the front wheels and then to a immovable object like a large tree close to our tent. When we decide on our pitch we usually look for one near to something that we can lock the bikes to. We usually remove water bottles, pumps etc. and store these in the awning of our tent.

We also carry a Halfords bike cover which goes over both bikes, essentially to keep the rain off but it also keeps them out of sight. You can see our bike cover on this image, although on this site there was so little to lock the bikes to they were just locked to themselves and being in a rural location in Norway there was little chance of them being stolen!

One of the reasons that we bought our Hilleberg Stalon GT tent was that it has a large vestibule that we could get the two bikes in. However In the 10 years that we have been touring we haven't felt that we needed to bother and have always left them locked up outside. My concern on bike theft would depend on the country and where the campsite is, if it was a campsite in a city I might be more concerned than perhaps a rural site.

If someone was determined to steel our bikes I know that the bike cable lock wouldn't last more than a few seconds with a pair of bolt cutters, however I think most professional bike thieves wouldn't think to go to a campsite to steal bikes, it just stops the opportunist thief. Yes we could carry a heavy duty expensive D lock, but an article in the latest CTC magazine showed that in the hands of a professional thief even these would only last 42 seconds, so I can't see the need to lug an extra couple of pounds of D lock about, the rig is heavy enough as it is!

Our Giant bikes would be about £1000 each to replace and we have them obviously insured and that is currently with the CTC, this does give us peace of mind.