Here are ten handy rules to follow when you’re going on a long-range bike tour, especially one far from home. This is based on my own experience and I update it as I learn.
Are you late for that train connection on the other side of the city? Too bad. Cancel the reservation and remake it for later. Even if it costs you money.
Really want to get over that 7000-foot mountain pass, but your schedule only has one day for it? Take a day off and use it to re-arrange your schedule.
Fifteen miles outside of town, but that lovely restaurant closes in an hour? Get creative: Call the restaurant and ask if they deliver to your hotel. Call your hotel and ask them to receive the meal before you arrive. Straining on the pedals and rushing around corners is not an option.
Not hurrying also applies when you’re off the bike. Do your best to avoid getting into situations where you have to hurry to pack your gear, unpack your gear, lock your bike, choose your route, book your next destination, cook, eat, set up your tent, and so on. Fixing a mistake you made when you were hurrying will often cost far more time than it would’ve taken to slow down in the first place.
Items left behind,
flats from under-inflated tires,
prematurely dead batteries leaving you disconnected or in the dark,
a hanging strap chewed up into your gears,
items dropping out of bags who-knows-where miles back on the road,
… All way more costly than the time it takes to avoid them.
The baseline daily routine of a long range cyclist is to bicycle from the safest possible place to the next safest possible place, along the safest possible route, at the safest speed, at the safest time of day. When you’re on an adventure there will be days when you deviate from one of these conditions, and you’ll get away with it. However, if you deviate from two at the same time, trouble will seek you out. The biggest reason anyone chooses to deviate from these conditions is they are in a hurry.
Don’t hurry. I’m serious here: This rule is the difference between riding for three days and getting your spine broken by a truck on day three, and riding for three years and rolling into the driveway back home on the last day without a scratch on you and a head stuffed full of amazing memories.
Riding that loaded bike, you’re a curiosity to almost everyone you meet, including other travelers.
That high visibility adds to your safety. People will want to talk to you, and if you are friendly in response they will often want to help you as well – offering food, a ride, even money or a place to stay. You can trust these people almost universally. Ask for anything you need, as long as you don’t feel like a jerk for asking. The worst they can do is say no. Consider printing (or hand-drawing) a little stack of contact cards so you can hand them out.
It’s the people who don’t approach you – the people who keep their distance and stare, or who point you out to their friends but don’t engage directly – that you need to be careful around.
Sometimes it’s best to embrace the first kind of people as protection against the second. For example, accepting a ride from the kind elderly couple in the back of their pickup, just to move a few miles down the road from that creepy group of teenagers eyeballing you and your bike at the restaurant. After enough time on the road you’ll develop a gut sense for when people aren’t responding right. Don’t ignore it.
There’s also a more specific version of this rule:
If you see a cyclist coming the other way, stop for a friendly chat and ask about the road ahead. Then tell them about the road you’ve already cycled, so they get the same benefit. You’ll be teaching a good habit by example as you go.
At destinations and pit stops you can also ask drivers for advice, but take anything they say about conditions or hills with a grain of salt. Drivers usually know less than they think about roads, even the ones they drive every day.
Get a good-sized rear view mirror and learn how to use it.
In many situations, snapping your head around for a quick look is just too much to coordinate. Besides, you might be whipping it right into the side mirror of a truck!!
Being able to instantly see that you should just roll off the road and wait for an especially big vehicle to clear some narrow chunk of road can save your bacon.
If you are cycling with partners, get radio intercom devices for your helmets, if you can afford them. They are astoundingly useful. Coordination will be much easier and the trip will be way more fun.
Almost all the intercoms for bicyclists are adapted from products used by motorcyclists. Motorcyclists wear head-enclosing helmets (at least the sane ones do) and the intercoms attach to the inside, but a bicyclist gets a more open-air design, with straps or rods that place the speakers near the ears without blocking them entirely. This is because external sound is very important:
A little advance notice is essential when cars approach from behind or around blind corners. Even the quietest electric car will still make noise as its tires roll over the pavement. (You can’t rely on it, but it’s useful when it’s there.)
I won’t go so far as saying never wear headphones – I wear headphones regularly when I bike – but I will say keep your music at a low volume and find some way to shelter your ears from the noise of the rushing wind. Vortex-generating attachments on the outside of your headphones or helmet can actually reduce the wind so much that you can hear better than you would with your ears uncovered.
There are rancorous discussions all over the internet about whether headphones are an acceptable risk when biking. Just use common sense. Take them off when you’re trying to navigate a new city.
This is strange advice to give to bike tourists because they’re an adventurous bunch. But, consider this:
The internet has changed bike touring immeasurably by letting cyclists widely share route recordings. Any time you want to go somewhere new, tap into those online collections and see if someone else has already forged a path ahead of you. Chances are high you’ll find something to use as a reference.
Routes with flagged points of interest, or comments, like “this was insane and I’m never doing it again”, are especially useful!
Take a few more breaks than you think you need to.
Sure, you could push those pedals nonstop for an entire afternoon. You’re a touring cyclist – you’ve got stamina up the wazoo. But if your wazoo starts to hurt after the fifth consecutive hour, it will keep hurting for the rest of the day no matter how many breaks you take.
Why spend half the day with a painful wazoo? Stop every hour at least, and stretch or lay down or do a few cartwheels, because you’re on a tour and you can stop whenever the heck you want.
When you’re traveling in a group this doesn’t matter, but when you’re going solo you’ll feel much better if you can lock your bike, then unload it in one go. It’s easy to lose something (to oversight or theft) if you’re leaving one pile of gear unguarded while you go back for another pile.
Usually all you need to do is put shoulder-length straps on one pair of bags, so you can wear those and pick up the other pair of bags by their handles. Instead of a rack-top bag consider a backpack.
Oh look, my bike is already on the plane ahead of me! Airtags are awesome.
Stick Airtags on your bike, and on your bike box.
Checking your bike as a piece of luggage can be amazingly convenient. But if you fly enough times, an airline will eventually misplace your bike. Having up-to-the-minute accurate information on exactly where your bike is – and that it’s still in the box – is unbelievably reassuring, and is also very useful information to present to a baggage clerk when you’re trying to figure out who is responsible for the error, and what the timeframe is for getting it sorted out.
They may not have the authority or the time to go hunting for your bicycle personally, but being able to prove to a clerk that your bike exists and is at their airport will motivate them to help you, more than they would help a person who has no idea whatsoever where their item has gone.
Don’t get angry about it – that will always work against you – but be insistent. I’ve had a clerk try to mansplain to me that a 60-second-old ping from an Airtag doesn’t necessarily mean it knows where it is right then. I just calmly replied, “Airtags don’t work that way. They are actually never aware of their own location; the devices around them that receive the ping are, and those devices are what do the reporting. I can explain to you in detail how this works, if you’re interested.”
She had the grace to say no, and since I was still polite company, she kept helping me.
Anyway, for your own sanity, get some Airtags.
Good luck finding your way to the right port on this map.
The Open Cycle map has way more useful detail here than either Google or Apple can muster.
The “Open Cycling” map is your friend.
Apple and Google work pretty hard to make their maps useful, but the crowd-sourced nature of the OpenStreetMap project often raises it head-and-shoulders above the more corporate options.
Especially in Europe, which has leaned heavily into it. Get yourself an application like “Map Plus” and add the cycling version of OpenStreetMap to it, and crank up the cache settings. It has such sights to show you…
Somebody either dropped their Samsung phone out the window by accident, or threw it out of frustration.
Somebody either dropped their Samsung phone out the window by accident, or threw it out of frustration.
Get a cheap spare phone.
A cell phone is an incredibly useful and convenient tool on a bike tour. It’s easy to become dependent on one without realizing. A compass and a few printed paper maps in a bag can mitigate that risk, but there’s no denying how devastating it can be to lose your phone.
So, consider buying a really cheap, ugly looking smart phone to bring along as a spare. Wrap it in a waterproof sack, tape it shut, and hide it somewhere in your gear. If you’re out in the wilderness and your fancy one gets waterlogged or smashed, all you need to do is switch the sim cards and carry on. Even if your regular phone drops into a ravine or goes to the bottom of a lake, the backup phone can still be used as soon as you find wifi.
Makes its full shape only after using at least two stakes.
Great for single-night stays and time spent mostly on the bike in unpopulated areas.
More risky because far more equipment needs to stay outside under the tent flaps.
Not good for remaining indoors during rainy days, due to low ceiling and lack of room.
Great weight-to-space ratio.
Decent for rain, not great for snow.
Line of pockets at front is good for small items but additional after-market hanging storage should be added.
Note that in all the photos below, I have attached a large Heimplanet tarp to the side of the Fistral, creating a enormous vestibule. (See postscript at the bottom of this post.)
Set up in the corner of the campground, for maximum wind blockage.
The Fistral is my favorite one-person bike touring tent. It’s roomy, versatile, and absurdly easy to set up over and over again, even in the dark. The extra weight is worth it. I’ve taken it all over, from the Nevada desert to the rainy shores of Iceland.
Aside from the difficulty in high wind (30+ mph), this is a really great all-around tent. I’d say it’s the best one Heimplanet makes, drawing on everything they’ve learned from previous designs.
This tent is too heavy for backpacking or biking, but I’ve deployed it on many vehicle-based camping trips, including the California mountains and at Toorcamp in Washington. It’s sturdy, dead simple to deploy, and easy to clean, though the narrow door doesn’t do it any favors. It’s the first and the most eye-catching design by Heimplanet, and it got me hooked on the whole idea of inflatable tents.
Large Tent (The Backdoor) – 6.2 kg / 13.7 lb (4-Season)
About 3.5 minutes to inflate with small pump.
Decent weight-to-space ratio. Twice as heavy as Fistral but with 3x the space and a higher ceiling.
Pocket arrangement has indoor/outdoor division, same as the Cave.
Large enough to deploy a large bed, unpack gear, and comfortably use a chair at the same time.
Almost enough vestibule space to enclose an entire bicycle!
Semi-reliant on guy lines.
Can remain standing even without guylines if one of the four struts fails, though it will list somewhat.
Ventilation options are very good, even better than the Fistral.
Good in rain and wind and snow if guy lines are used.
Has a very large footprint:
Too large for almost all indoor deployments.
So large it may upset other people competing for space.
Difficult to find a patch of flat ground this large.
For one person this is overkill, and for two it’s luxury. You can stick the equivalent of a queen size bed in here and still have room for your stuff. Far too heavy for bike touring, but it’s been part of my standard car camping gear ever since it was introduced.
Requires laying out with four stakes before inflation, but additional stakes are optional.
Each side is large enough for two adults to sleep comfortably, as long as they face towards the inside door. Three could fit (total of six), but it could get awkward.
Average weight-to-space ratio.
Average ventilation. Large mesh door but side flaps are small.
Enormous central area for storing gear. Almost wide enough for two loaded bicycles side-by-side.
Extremely large footprint.
Too large for indoor deployment.
So large it may upset other people competing for space.
Difficult to find a patch of flat ground this large.
This is the only tent Heimplanet makes that absolutely requires stakes. Without them, the sleeping areas will not take their shape.
Conclusions
Based on the above, it seems to make the most sense to travel with the Fistral through remote areas, use the Kirra for more rural camping, and use the Backdoor only when traveling with three or more companions.
This is a little disappointing, since the Backdoor is luxurious to use. Lots of ventilation, tons of space, room to work inside, a giant vestibule for cooking… It’s too bad it weighs so much, because if I’m going to be living in a tent for months at a time, I’m going to need a place that can feel like a home.
Postscript: A giant vestibule makes the Fistral an ideal one-person touring tent!
Since my first few rounds of using the Fistral I’ve discovered that it’s possible to clip a lightweight tarp to one side of it and use the tarp to cover a bicycle parked parallel to the tent, with most of my gear still on it.
With the tarp attached, the Fistral is basically a good-sized one-man tent with a rear vestibule that’s larger than the living space. When the edges are staked down on opposite ends of the bike, the entire bike forms the outside wall of the vestibule, keeping the contents – bike included – safe from rain, and easily accessible through one of the doors in the tent. It’s also ventilated enough for cooking.
With the bicycle visibly concealed and staked down it is far less likely to be snatched by thieves, and I never have to worry about a wet seat or chain when I pack up in the morning.
I’ve deployed this tent dozens of times over multiple trips and years, and it’s worked brilliantly.
It’s already obvious that I am pretty obsessed with bicycle touring. As time and funds have permitted in my life, I’ve taken longer and more complicated trips, the longest being about two months. Occasionally I hear about other bike tourists who are so hardcore and obsessed that they have cycled across entire continents or even around the world. That idea has always felt bold and intimidating, but not for me. The last time it came up was seven years ago, and it dropped into the back of my head and percolated there until I forgot about it.
Fast-forward a bunch of time, to 2018. Last year, I was feeling stagnated in my job, tired of my living space, and bored with the geography of the Bay Area. I’d been obsessively playing the computer game Civilization V, and the art deco monuments and colorful pastel mountains and rivers had colonized my imagination. The world was full of light and conflict. I’d just finished a loopy sci-fi novel by Stephen Baxter about spacefaring Roman legions and moon-dwelling Incan tribes, and though the premise was absurd, the collision of remote culture and high technology was inspiring. It came up again in a surreal novel by Dan Simmons: Quantum technology and the siege of Troy, on Mars! My mind was an avalanche of sandstone and granite ruins knotted with ivy and wildflowers, teeming with people in exotic clothes, trading or fighting or building together.
I was seized with the urge to take a vacation, and go far out into the world and touch the artifacts of history. But while I was still working, it would have to be a typical Silicon Valley “get away from the desk” vacation, and I knew how those usually went. I’d be in a rush, moving between various modes of transport, skipping across thousands of miles to hit a packaged highlight reel of well-traveled attractions, trying to use the experience as a hammer to smash some dents into a brain shaped by months and months of software engineering. The vacation would not be for its own sake, it would be to prepare me for another six months back at work.
I knew that would not do. These ideas were calling for a bigger change. I spent several weekends biking around and sketching in the beautiful Mountain View cemetery at the end of Piedmont Avenue, enjoying the fresh air and the quiet, sun-warmed granite monoliths. I began browsing around in Google Earth, tracking down the cities I’d conquered and the wonders I’d built in Civilization, and reading about the history and geography of far off places. Samarkand… In the first edition of Civilization it’s the seat of power of the Mongolians. In Civilization V it’s a powerful, independent city-state usually located in desert. Where is it really? Here it is, in Uzbekistan. There’s a country named Uzbekistan? Wow, I didn’t even know that. How could there be a country that I do not know the name of, at my age?
I started thinking a lot about my picture of the world, and how much of it was based on unverified assumptions, convenient metaphors, current political fashions, and apocryphal stories. I felt intensely ignorant and confined. I needed to break out of my routine, and experience the world outside in a direct and personal way. I needed to crowbar myself out of an existence that was too comfortable. If I didn’t have the means now, when would I ever? Suddenly, the idea of a long-range bike tour popped up from the depths of my mind, threw confetti in my face, and said, “hey idiot, remember me?”
At first I didn’t know what to do. The idea was equal parts enthralling and terrifying, giving me a sense of ambivalence, but it was also sticking hard in my brain like a flyer glued to the windshield of a car. A real long-range bike tour means leaving the Bay Area for a long time. It means spending my savings, and it means I need to rent out my current place to help pay for the house, otherwise my savings would vanish immediately. It means quitting or renegotiating my job. It means being away from my friends and family. Most important of all, it means not having a significant other, because what girlfriend in her right mind would actually be interested in a crazy journey like this?
For a while I hoped the idea would diminish, as it had before, so I wouldn’t have to confront its practical details. But it just set up camp and grew larger and rowdier like a Greek army laying siege to the city of my mind. Eventually, during an intense discussion where I felt encouraged to take risks, I spoke out loud about the idea for the first time. It was like opening the city gates. As I heard myself describe it, trying to convey the intensity of it to another person, the Greek army rushed inside, and suddenly I no longer belonged to myself. I belonged to this journey.
So. I intend to begin a long bicycle trip carrying all my gear, starting in Iceland, with a destination of England. Perhaps by then I will be sick of traveling. Perhaps I will settle in England, or return to California. Or perhaps I will continue on, through Spain and France. Perhaps I will circumnavigate the planet. Who knows?
The tentative departure date is 100 days from now.
This raises a lot of questions, like “Are you crazy?” and, “How long will this take?” and, “Are you aware of these things we have, called cars?”, and of course, “Do you know how dangerous this is?”
I’ll answer that last question up front by saying, yes, this is dangerous. In the coming months I’m not going to talk about the danger much, because it’s not something I want to dwell on, but I should at least say that if I do end up frozen solid in a snowdrift, or dead at the bottom of a ravine with my equipment scattered around me, or – most likely – squashed flat by a truck like Wile E. Coyote in the desert, that this is something I accepted as a possibility when I started. And I chose to do it anyway.
Yes, it’s a fatalistic attitude. But in the time leading up to this journey I have become so obsessed with the idea of attempting it that it has started to feel like an inevitability. Like a part of my identity. If I was any less obsessed maybe I would choose to stay at home. Keep circling in that worn-down trench between house, workplace, and supermarkets; maybe take a series of smaller risks. But I honestly feel like I don’t have that choice any more. The Greek army has plundered the city, and is running it now. If I am fated for the snowdrift, or the ravine, or the logging truck, then so be it!
There’s also the possibility that I will grow to hate this journey after I embark. After three or four months on the bicycle, toiling up hills in the middle of nowhere, I may suddenly snap, dump my equipment in a pawnshop, and buy a ticket back to the states. That is an acceptable outcome. But I’m also pretty stubborn, so — we’ll see!
