Category: Touring Advice
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27 Cycle Touring & Bikepacking Apps For Every Imaginable Purpose
While I’m a big advocate of low-tech bike tours, almost every long-distance rider today is bringing along their smartphone for the ride. But what exactly are the best apps for cycle touring and bikepacking? It’s a tricky question. To my knowledge, there is no single app that does everything an cycle tourer or bikepacker wants when exploring the world by bicycle. And that’s probably because the cycle touring or bikepacking lifestyle is a complex, multi-faceted thing, taking in a diverse range of activities that go way beyond route planning and navigation. No one app could possibly serve all of them! This… Continue reading →
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How To Wild Camp Anywhere For Free And Not Get Busted
Wild camping (aka: stealth camping, free camping, or rough camping) is the practice of sleeping outside in a place of your choosing, rather than on an designated campsite or campground. If you’re on a long journey, wild camping might be a necessity due to budget, the lack of other options, or for the love of sleeping outdoors. It’s not so much fun if you’re confronted and asked to move on in the middle of the night, and this is the biggest fear I hear from those new to the idea – but there are plenty of simple tips and tricks… Continue reading →
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Cycle Touring & Bikepacking Insurance: All You Need To Know (& Popular Insurers)
This is a detailed introduction to understanding and choosing insurance for cycle touring and bikepacking trips, both short-term and long-term. I get a lot of questions on the topic of insurance for cycle tours, so this article is my attempt to answer all of them in one thoroughly researched, human-written, 100% AI-free post. The following advice is generally applicable to anyone looking to insure a cycle tour or bikepacking trip, whatever length, duration or destination you have in mind, and whether it’s your first ever bike trip or you’re just looking for up-to-date information about insurers who cover travelling by… Continue reading →
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Do I Really Need Ortliebs? A Buyer’s Guide To Panniers For Cycle Touring
One day in 1884, Thomas Stevens left California on a bicycle, carrying a bag of gold and a pistol rolled up in a blanket, and became the first person in recorded history to cycle round the world. Today’s bicycle travellers pack a little more gear than that! That’s because we want to enjoy seeing the world, rather than bribing and bullying our way through our bike tours as Stevens did. To carry all the cycle touring equipment commonly used today – ultralight tents, camping stoves & cookware, clothes, toolkits, and other core kit-list items – most bike tourers attach panniers to their… Continue reading →
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A Full List Of Heavy Duty Touring Bikes For Round-The-World Rides
Following a ludicrous amount of research (by humans, not robots), I present to you a detailed spreadsheet of ultra-heavy-duty touring bikes being built and sold around the world, featuring bicycles from 44 builders in 9 countries on 3 continents, and links to each bike’s official webpage. The bikes in this list are not designed for short cycling holidays, nor for casual local bike tours (though they’d be fine for these kinds of cycle tour too). No: they’ve been designed specifically for extremely long, fully-loaded, self-sufficient bicycle journeys through remote parts of the world on challenging terrain over periods of time measured in years.… Continue reading →
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Touring Bike FAQ #7: What Should I Remember Before Handing Over My Cash?
This is #7 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re new here, why not start with #1: What Exactly Defines A Touring Bike? There are a few aspects of touring bike choice so utterly basic that they’re often lost in the quagmire of internet-based research. This is particularly the case when browsing websites for advice on touring bikes: features and technical specifications are a lot easier to talk about than the all-important intangibles. In this post, we’ll look at a few final checklist items you should review as a touring bike buyer before you commit… Continue reading →
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Touring Bike FAQ #6: What’s The Best Way To Avoid Buying The Wrong Bike?
This is #6 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re new here, why not start with #1: What Exactly Defines A Touring Bike? When it comes to actually buying the touring bike you’ve spent months researching, it can be tempting to start researching online retailers. After all, that’s how we buy everything else these days. Online-only bike retailers can often undercut high street bike shops by a large amount, for various reasons: Continue reading →
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Touring Bike FAQ #5: Derailleur Or Rohloff/Pinion Internal Gears?
This is #5 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re new here, why not start with #1: What Exactly Defines A Touring Bike? There are people in this world who will argue until the end of all time about whether or not a touring bike should be fitted with a Rohloff Speedhub or, more recently, a Pinion centre-mounted gearbox. I am not one of these people. You probably aren’t, either. If you’re unfamiliar with Rohloff or Pinion, they are makers of internally geared hubs and gearboxes for bicycles, each of which costs more than… Continue reading →
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21 UK Touring & Bikepacking Bike Shops To Visit In 2024
These days, there are a lot of bike shops in the UK selling touring bikes and bikepacking gear. There are far fewer, however, who are specialised in these fields. This is not surprising. Cycle touring remains a tiny and underserved niche. Bikepacking is trending, and suddenly there’s money to be made selling mountain bikes with weird-shaped bags attached to them, but for most UK bike shops, sticking an old touring bike in a corner somewhere is about as far as it goes. But a few brave shop owners and bike builders have made a name for themselves as true touring and… Continue reading →
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Touring Bike FAQ #4: Disc Brakes or Rim Brakes (V‑Brakes)?
This is #4 in an ever-growing series of answers to frequently-asked questions about touring bikes. If you’re new here, why not start with #1: What Exactly Defines A Touring Bike? While most high-end touring bikes are nowadays fitted with disc brakes, there’s still plenty of debate over whether V‑brakes or disc brakes are actually ‘better’ for touring. And, as usual, there’s no clear-cut answer. I’m sorry about that. V‑brakes, for the purposes of this post, are a generic and misused term for the several varieties of caliper brakes that work by pinching the bicycle wheel’s rim between two brake blocks to… Continue reading →