Best Bike Tours

Here you will find one of the calmest parts of the trail, with easily locatedpoints of interest from Soviet Union times. Below, you can find some tips and recommendations for your perfect experience of traveling in Latvia. For those up to the weather challenge, cycling the whole coast of Norway will make for a trip of a lifetime. The tracks here are to be taken as a rough guideline, check each country’s guide for more detailed routes. Don’t forget to always remain open to improvisation and variations of your route, don’t always stick yo a plan… sometimes go with the flow.

In just nine days, you’ll cover five different countries on the Baltic Sea during this Backroads tour, which combines cycling and cruising. The journey begins in Denmark, where you’ll tour cosmopolitan Copenhagen before biking out into the countryside and eventually the shore. After sailing across the sea to Tallinn, Estonia, you’ll spend a day exploring the medieval city and biking through woodlands and beaches. Next up is St. Petersburg, Russia, where you’ll not only see the city by bike but also by kayak through its many canals (it’s not called the Venice of the North for nothing).

Classic Climbs: The Alps Bike Tour

Organised tour The Carter Company has a seven-night self-guided trip, starting and ending in Pisa, from £890 B&B, including bike hire and luggage transfers. Explore is a travel company in the UK with over 500 trips to more than 120 countries, including a selection of bicycling tours. The bike touring company offers events in many countries. Its distinct options include tours in the Czech Republic and Slovenia. The bicycle tour company is known for its multi-day Prague tours.

National Geographic Trails Illustrated Maps are another great resource for this, as is the Benchmark Atlas series, albeit more specific to the American West. In addition, regionally specific singletrack and mountain bike maps are often helpful. A detailed route description will give you the freedom to ride at your own pace and choose your own distance. Having a guide on a bike gives you the opportunity to simply follow. A good touring company can offer you both choices on the same trip. This is certainly the most convenient way to travel by bicycle, because everything has been taken care of.

Solo Women Cyclists Who Have Epic Bicycle Touring Experience

You’ll also have time to hike the 1-mile trail to the top. Lizard Head Cycling Guides provides all meals on all tours including breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Guides will prepare a daily lunch en route for nearly every tour, both road and off-road, as well as provide nutritious snacks at periodic aid stations during the day.

• I can sit for hours looking at maps of places I don’t know, imagining what the locale looks like and deciding what areas I want to visit.
• With an audience volume backed by Pinkbike, the popular mountain biking portal, it should only grow and mature.
• BLM land is also generally a safe bet and often has camping opportunities.
• We’ve tapped into it for routefinding all around the world.

Apulia, know in Italy as Puglia, is a region in southeastern Italy that includes the heel part of Italy’s boot. It is bordered by the sea on two sides, the Adriatic Sea in the east and the Ionian Sea to the southeast. Specially if it’s in Europe, it’s pretty easy to just go with the wind, and stop whenever you feel like. Headwinds – use the weather forecast to help predict your distance, you will soon work out the effect of different strength wind on your riding. Note the name of your club to receive interesting discount offers. We were very impressed with the high level of customer service.

Today’s Top Travel Deals

We relied on Europe’s railways to visit a wider range of places than we could have by bicycle alone. Purchasing tickets ahead of time can reduce the price, but having to be at a particular train station on a particular day may add unnecessary stress to your trip. In France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, we never had a problem showing up at a train station and buying a ticket for the same day. Also, buying tickets from an agent at the station ensured we were always on a train that allowed bicycles and that we had a ticket for our bikes if necessary. If you are obliged to travel during July and August, you may want to pick somewhere that is less well-known . Decide whether to go solo, with a partner, or with a group.

This article has really put some insight into my outlook for a long bicycle touring. May be I shall be able to do one in March , after some initial training for stamina and strength routines. Finally, something always seems to go wrong on the first day of a bicycle tour, and you should schedule in some time to deal with any mishaps that might occur during your first day on the road. Maybe you’re bike’s tire will burst during the first few hours and you’ll need to find a replacement? Maybe you will have forgotten to pack a toothbrush, so you’ll need to hunt one down?

Rhine River Cruise Full Ship Celebration Bike Tour

From there there’s plenty of routes where to get lost among the hundreds characteristic tiny villages. Aside from Latvia’s capital, Riga, which is included in the route, the areas are sparsely populated but not forgotten. In recent years, Estonia is attracting more and more tourists, both for its nature and for the beautiful medieval cities, but also for what remains of the period of Soviet occupation. Cycling Finland in winter is, of course, a totally different matter.

Also, it’s important to note that we did not keep careful track of our set-up costs . If high-tech equipment, you might easily spend $1,500-2,000 on a custom bike and another $1,000 on gear. Spending $3,000-5,000 on new gear would add between $3-5 to your daily cost over 3 years. This is a high estimate and also remember that you will likely come home with much of this gear and still be able to use it. Our bikes are still good to go for the next tour, as is our stove, our cooking equipment and our rain gear, among other things.

Guided Vietnam & Cambodia Easy Bike Tour

VTB’s easygoing seven-day guided tour sticks to quiet country roads, where you’ll pedal past olive groves, beaches, and stone-sculpted seaside towns. Out of the saddle, there’s an afternoon of olive oil tasting, plus several farm-fresh meals prepared by local hosts. Although very little climbing is involved, e-Bikes are available on request. Cover more than 200 miles of Norway’s stunning fjordlands on this six-day tour with TrekTravel, designed for experienced riders. When stationed in Germany I found a three day tour in Normandy, France and Bastogne, Belgium on alternate years that celebrates the D-Day landing and liberation of Europe during WWII.

Anyone can follow a GPX plucked from one of the countless map-share websites these days — but who knows how that will turn out? We think it’s far more rewarding to travel a route that’s been crafted with thought, contemplation and experience. We’ve touched on route planning before; view the article here for an overview. In this post, we’ll be delving into the mechanics of it all. Naturally, no tour operator, no matter how upscale, can control the weather.

Don’t Want To Bring Your Bike?

But that’s one of the things we love about cycle touring. In this guide, we share the joys and challenges of bike travel so you can decide if it’s right for you. Download this free 86-page eBook, fully updated in 2015. Without further adieu, I’ve ranked the best places to find a bicycle touring companion or bikepacking partner. Founded in 1986, Easy Rider has over three decades of experience operating guided bicycling vacations and self-guided bike tours in Europe, Canada and New England. I have long wanted to start bicycling and go on a bicycle tour of North India.

Travelling by bike is in itself a minimal-impact approach but we do everything we can as a company, on and off tour to make our impact positive. Enjoy Dutch landscapes by wheels and water on this springtime tour. Granted the RWGPS Plan a Route application takes some practice, it’s truly a great tool. RWGPS offers a detailed help area which includes a few how-to videos on general topics such as Route Planning or more specific advanced techniques such as Combining and Splitting Routes. In addition, based on a lot of use and head scratching, here are a few tips we put together.

Bike Tours

The Texas Hill Country Bike Tour is designed for intermediate to advanced cyclists with various levels of fitness. Each day there are additional mileage options for advanced riders. With the rolling terrain and only a few steep & long climbs, Hill Country Bike Tour is a good tour for early season conditioning. In the morning, you’ll set off on this region’s signature ride, the Willow City Loop. This scenic route stops at Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, an enormous dome of pink granite covering a full square mile and rising 425 feet above the surrounding countryside.

You will pass by Nazaré, a legendary surf spot where the professional big wave surfer Garret McNamara set a world record riding a 100 foot wave in 2013. The Portugal Self Guided Bike Tour follows uncrowded paved roads that pass by castles, fields of cork trees, and the land of ancient battles. Portugal Self Guided Bike Tour in the Alentejo are the perfect blend of natural beauty, medieval villages, tasty cuisine, and excellent wine.

Northern Portugal & Douro Valley Bike Tour

Request a brochure for more information on our wide range of adventure holidays. In the spirit of a lot of the trail sharing and open source maps we mentioned here, we’re considering this an open source guide. Obviously, we can’t include everything, but if we see anything compelling and relevant, we’ll add it above. The distinction between Rides and Routes can be a bit confusing. Sometimes when you upload a track, it saves it as a Ride. Make sure to ‘Copy To My Routes’ and work on it as a Route for further planning.