How does one start bicycle touring?

Out on the road, I occasionally get people asking what they need to do to start touring, or where they can find information on how to do it. Rather than just give the formula for my rides, I’m going to suggest ways to get started, and ways to ramp it up when you feel ready.

Start Small, Test Everything

An effective approach in just about anything is to start small, run some tests, learn from them, and then scale it up. Jumping straight in—say, attempting a cross-country bike tour when you haven’t ridden a bike since grade-school—is likely to be a miserable failure.

First, start riding around home:

Local riding gets you ready to scale up. Physically, it’ll help get you in shape. Your legs will gain strength and endurance. If you’re riding diamond-frame, your butt will gain tolerance to hours on the seat. You can begin to acquire some riding outfits.

Additionally, you can use this bike to start learning maintenance, because when touring, you’re going to need to be able to fix your bike if you break down in the middle of nowhere. On road, flat tires are the most common issue, but also brake and derailleur adjustments and/or cable replacement. Replacing a spoke is a good skill to have too.

eBikes

After an initial round of “let’s add a motor to a bicycle”, eBikes have evolved into their own thing. Most eBikes now have heavier, sturdier frames capable of carrying gear. They come with sturdier tires and drive-train components. This is all great—you are less likely to break down, encounter a flat, and the motor will assist you.

When you’re doing your local rides, pay attention to battery usage so you can plan your daily distances. When you run out of battery, it’s going to be “all on you” to push yourself, bike, battery and gear up hills. You want to avoid planning days longer than your bike’s range.

Hills are going to reduce your daily range. However, some eBikes have “regenerative braking”, meaning that they can recapture excess momentum to recharge the battery. This will reduce the impact to your bike’s range on hilly terrain, since you can recapture energy on the downhills. Without regenerative braking, expect hills to have a significant impact on range.

Find a starter tour

Don’t start with a long-distance tour. Go out for a weekend or a few days. Start from home and ride to nearby places, so you’re familiar with the territory and resources, and if you get into trouble you can get rescued without much trouble.

You need not start with a self-supported camping tour. You can work your way up via alternatives:

On supported camping tours I’ve done, charging devices has been a problem: every available outlet is filled with somebody’s 1-port wall-wart. (Smart tours would be smart to arm themselves with some 40-port USB charging stations to fix this problem.) I forsee eBikes just making more competition for a limited resource.

If some of these starter tours go well, take on something a little more challenging. From your first tours, you’ll know about your capabilities and limits, preferred terrain and surface, whether you like roads or trails, how tough you find heat or rain, whether you like camping or a nice comfy bed at the end of the night.

Camping Tours

Whether camping with a group-ride or self-supported, you will need:

Self-Supported Touring

If you’re doing a self-supported tour, you’ll need to invest in additional stuff:

If you’re camping:

What do I carry?

When picking clothes, plan on layering and reusing. I have a set of riding clothes that get sweaty and smelly, and reused a few days. When I get a shower, I change into some post-ride clothes that also get reused, but are not as sweaty or smelly. I carry some options (say, short sleeve, long sleeve, and sleeveless). Then there’s a warm set of clothes for night time, which I can layer with evening clothes if it gets really cold (overlapping uses is your friend). A warm pair of socks is important: if your feet get cold, you get cold.

The most redundancy is in socks and underwear.

Swimsuit? During a ride I’ll just jump in a lake with my sports bra and riding pants (overlapping uses again); the evaporative cooling afterward is a perk. After a ride, it’s late in the day and hard to get stuff to dry, so it can get a funk and/or be wet in the morning. So, I carry either a super-skimpy bathing suit (to keep the weight down) or one that can work as a third set of riding clothes (overlapping uses). My father, on the other hand, would probably think this is stupid and just swim in his riding clothes, then wear them until they body-dried.

I like to stop every 5–7 days and do laundry. Some people (my dad) will just wash stuff out every night and call it good, but I find stuff still gets a funky odor.

To do: Pictures and gear list/breakdown.

Planning ahead: handling a breakdown

What’s your plan for a breakdown? For a flat you can carry a patch kit and, but what if you get a full blowout? If you’re in a city, you’re okay. What if you’re in the middle of nowhere? How far from a bike shop will you be? Some options are:

These will work in suburbs and rural areas, but not in the middle of nowhere. If you’re going to be off the grid, be it off-road or an infrequently-used dirt road, you may be on your own unless you’ve got a satellite phone or a personal locator beacon.

Longer Self-Supported Tours

After a few short/local/group tours to get started, you can advance to longer self-supported tours. These have new challenges.

Planning routes vs. “winging” it

I prefer to plan my route ahead of time. When I started:

I still meticulously plan my route ahead of time, partly out of paranoia that the phone is going to fail me. The one time I tried to “wing it”, my phone did indeed let me down. But, things are improving. Battery life, waterproofness, durability, and network availability are much better than a decade ago.

Still, there are advantages to planning ahead: Once I’m on the bike, I just follow my cue sheets. There is no worry about any tech problem. If I need to make a change or deal with a problem, tech can help with that, but it doesn’t introduce new problems or worries. This allows me to relax more, better focus on and enjoy the ride.

But there are limits to this approach. My trips are usually between 1,000km and 2,000km, or about a dozen double-sided sheets of paper for cue sheets and resource lists (relevant businesses, phone numbers, and websites along the way). At some point, that strategy is no longer feasible.

Some cyclists plan their route as they go. To do this, you’ll need a device with excellent battery life (a good capacity battery, efficient chipset, software that doesn’t waste battery life), that’s durable, with a good protective cover to improve that durability more. Make sure the storage is well-sized (so you can download stuff and work locally when off the network or the network is turned off, which saves battery).

Planning a route

Adventure Cycling is respected for their extensive selection of maps and guides, which include information on resources (lodging, campgrounds, grocery stores, laundries) along the way. Advantages: it saves you the time and trouble of planning a route, the route has been carefully chosen and debugged. Downside: the routes might not go where you want.

If you really want to plan a route yourself, Google Maps has a bicycle mode that adds trails and highlights suggested bike routes. As of this writing, it’s currently hidden in Layers->More->Biking.

Maps' directions can also provide bike-optimized routes: when requesting directions, select the icon of the bicyclist. Biking directions include an elevation chart, so you know how hilly the route will be—but beware if it says “mostly flat”, because it sometimes it’s lying when it says that. As of this writing, the routes will use bike trails but highlighting of bike trails is not activated. You can chain up to 10 destinations together, to represent different places you want to visit or waypoints along your route.

Things to consider:

Waypoints

In addition to a route, you’re going to need waypoints—places to stay. Options are:

Services like WarmShowers
Friendly people offer crash space in their houses or tent space in their yard. It’s cheap, but requires the up-front cost of contacting people ahead of time and making arrangements. Oftentimes, they’re bicyclists too and you can swap stories.
Hotels, inns, and B&Bs
Nice and easy, but the cost can add up.
Hostels
More affordable, but oftentimes you’re in a shared bunkroom. Be sure to have ear plugs, and a blindfold might not hurt.
Campgrounds
I like camping. It’s low cost, other campers tend to be friendly, sometimes they have pools or beaches, and it’s nice to remain out in nature. Most campgrounds today have power for RV sites. Whether they have power at tent sites varies; if you’re on a eBike, you probably want a site with power. If you just have electronics to charge, you can often find a pavillion or bathroom where you can charge stuff.

I plan on camping, but will punt to other options when needed: when nowhere else is available, there’s no vacancy elsewhere, I’m soaked and want a break from being drenched—and occasionally, just because I know I like a particular place.

In addition to crash space, you’re going to need to resupply by hitting cities/villages every few days. Giving yourself options on bike stores and outfitters can also be helpful.

Depending on where you’re going, you may or may not need reservations. The Adirondacks, for example, tend to be busiest on the weekends, so reservations are a good idea on Friday and Saturday nights. Holiday weekends will extend this. The rest of the time, you can get away without them—usually. Special events, such as the Lake Placid Triathalon, can book things up at unusual times.

The downside of reservations is you’re committed to a schedule. If you have a breakdown or bad weather that puts you behind a day, then you either have to adjust the reservations or make up miles to get back on schedule.

Hotel sites only let you know what room types are available or not, so it’s guesswork how many actual rooms are left. The nice thing about campground reservation systems (where available) is they usually list available sites and let you pick a site, which means you can tell how close they are to full, and judge whether to make a reservation.

Communications

Keeping telephones working is a challenge on bike trips.

Buy a good case. I like the OtterBox Defender series, which comes with a belt-clamp. The phone fits face-in or face-out; when not using it, the phone can be placed face-in so the screen is protected. Additionally, although modern phones are supposedly waterproof, and the case too, consider a drybag for more than a drizzle.

Don’t rely on service in remote places; it can be nonexistent, spotty, or use the old, slow, power-hungry 4G. Many private campgrounds, but not all, have WiFi, so you can at least send & receive e-mails and access the 'net. And, some carriers offer WiFi calling—when switched on, you can make and receive calls using the WiFi you’re connected to, if it’s fast enough. (Sometimes, though, WiFi call quality sucks, so I usually leave WiFi calling off unless I need it.) If you’re going off the beaten paths, expect days you will simply be out of communications.

Keeping devices charged can be a challenge too. These days, many private campgrounds have power at campsites. Tent sites, however, are often excluded. You may be able to charge electronics in the bathroom or at a pavilion.

For New York State campgrounds operated by Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation, some provide hook-ups at all sites, some at limited sites, and some at none. New York State DEC Campgrounds never provide hook-ups, and official policy disallows charging any and all electronics. Campground attitude toward implementing this rule varies: some are very clear they will remove any device found, some post the policy document with no further comment, some never mention it. If charging is forbidden, friendly neighbors with generators may help you out if you ask nicely.

To extend your battery life, turn off transceivers when not in use:

Even with WiFi, BlueTooth and the 4G/5G transceivers off, the phone can still use its GPS receiver if it needs to know where it is, but since GPS is receive-only that’s low power. You can still take pictures (and they’ll be correctly geotagged), listen to music, read eBooks.

You will want to download maps in advance. In Google Maps, you can choose a region and download the maps for that area; I’m not sure about Apple Maps. Once downloaded, the phone doesn’t need to access servers to show the downloaded region, so even maps work in airplane mode, and when not in airplane mode, it reduces transceiver use and thus power use. There are a few limitations: standard maps only, no satelite or terrain; bicycle directions won’t work (but previously-retrieved directions still work).

To extend battery life, you can change some settings:

Additionally, when using your device: