Category: Bikes
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Touring Bike FAQ #1: What Exactly Defines A ‘Touring’ Bike?
This is #1 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re researching touring bikes online, chances are you don’t yet have a touring bike of your own – or if you do, you may be unsure of whether it’s really fit for the cycle tour you’re planning. In this case, it’s useful to have a working definition of the thing you want to buy. I don’t mean a boring dictionary definition; more like a set of criteria that distinguishes a touring bike from other subcategories of bicycle. This is important because choosing a touring bike is something people invest… Continue reading →
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What’s The Best Touring Bike? (2026 Edition)
Touring bike buying advice is a popular topic, so I update this post regularly to keep the details current. I’m currently mid-way through the 2026 update, so please excuse any out-of-date information. If you’ve found this article helpful, consider leaving a comment to share your touring bike buying experience. Thanks! Choosing a new touring bike can be pretty stressful for a newcomer to cycle touring – especially when you start looking at the price tags! So it’s no surprise the most common question I’ve been asked in 20 years of writing about cycle touring is some version of the following: “Help!… Continue reading →
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Is The Touring Bike Slowly Dying Out?
While recently updating the all-time most-read post on this blog, “What’s The Best Touring Bike?”, I realised something. Every year, the list of touring bikes seems to get shorter. First we lost bikes that were relatively obscure. A good example is the Revolution Country Traveller, built by the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-operative. This was a fantastic value entry-level tourer, retailing for under £500 and earning great praise. But it was limited in its distribution to EBC’s handful of locations in northern Britain, and I’m guessing it can’t have made much of a profit for just how cheap it was. But then, a… Continue reading →
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About The Time I Upcycled A Vintage Hardtail For Bikepacking & Rode It Across Armenia
In the months leading up to Bikepacking Armenia, I thought long and hard about whether to get myself a shiny new ‘bikepacking rig’ for the trip. Since I was in the UK for a few weeks in May, I took the opportunity to test-ride a Sonder Frontier with Adventure Pedlars in the Peak District. I tried out a Surly Karate Monkey at the Cycle Touring Festival, and I began mentally drafting my friends at Kona an email to see if they had a spare Unit X lying around. These bikes all fitted the current vogue for adventure bikes – all-terrain geometry,… Continue reading →
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How To Custom Build The Ultimate Expedition Touring Bike (With Pictures)
Some of the most frequently-asked questions I get on this blog are about designing and building custom touring bikes, whether DIY or built to order by a professional bike builder. Especially now the world has opened up to bicycle travel again, these questions often come from people planning cycle tours or bikepacking trips of ambitious scale – across multiple continents, or even around the world. But why would you want to custom-build a touring bike in the first place, rather than buy a commercially-manufactured one? I’ve come across a few common reasons: And of course, there are always folk who just… Continue reading →
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The Best Cheap (Sub-£1,000) Touring Bikes for Low-Budget Adventures
Many of the cheap touring bikes listed here did not survive the pandemic, so the latest edition of this post is shorter than before. For further options, you may wish to head over to the updated-for-2024 list of best touring bikes at all price points. As cycling continues to grow in popularity, many manufacturers have begun producing cheap, entry-level touring bikes aimed at cyclists and travellers on a lower budget. For me, as a long-time evangelist for the bicycle as the best way to see the world, seeing more cheap touring bikes on the market is a welcome trend. Some… Continue reading →
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First Glimpse: The New-For-2019 Oxford Bike Works Expedition Disc
When visiting the UK earlier this year, I popped over to Oxford Bike Works to catch up with Richard Delacour and to check out a prototype of the new Expedition Disc touring bike he’s been working on. This disc-equipped specification will be part of Richard’s custom-built bike lineup as of 2019, so I wanted to share some insights on what else makes this new touring bike different from the original Expedition and, perhaps more interestingly, why he decided to go down the disc brake route after years of steering clear of them (neither pun intended). Why Put Disc Brakes On An Expedition… Continue reading →
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What’s Really The Difference Between Bikepacking & Cycle Touring?
Over the last few years we have seen the rise of a new sub-discipline of bicycle travel. It’s called ‘bikepacking’, and it’s become such a hit that almost every mainstream bike manufacturer now produces at least one ‘adventure bike’ or ‘bikepacking rig’, or includes the word in their marketing spiel for bikes that might fit the bill. Specialised bikepacking luggage, too, has proliferated, from a few cottage industries turning out bespoke, hand-stitched frame bags to pannier giant Ortlieb launching a line. Someone I know who helps run a bikepacking website told me they get over one million hits per month. (For comparison,… Continue reading →
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Oxford Bike Works & Tom’s Expedition Bike: The Story So Far
Just before I flew out to Bangkok for my current trip, I paid a visit to Richard Delacour at Oxford Bike Works to collect Tenny’s newly upgraded tourer. Based on a vintage steel Trek frame, the lovingly recycled bike is a tidy piece of work, naturally — but it got me reflecting on the story of my acquaintance with Richard and his company; a tale of serendipity and good timing that still elicits a smile. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tom Allen (@tom_r_allen) I first met Richard in 2014 when he wrote to me asking if I’d… Continue reading →
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A Pro Bike Builder Reviews The ‘Adventure Flat White’ Budget Touring Bike
New this year at the budget end of the UK touring bike market is the Adventure Flat White, an entry-level road tourer whose RRP of £430 makes it the cheapest off-the-peg touring bike in the UK (at the time of writing). Being abroad for an extended period of time and thus unable to try the bike myself, I invited Richard of Oxford Bike Works (who recently bought himself a Flat White to see how they’d made it so cheap) to deliver his verdict on it. Take it away, Richard… Two disclaimers from the outset: These comments are written very much… Continue reading →