LYF Cycle Touring

Feedback from the Road

This page contains compiled data from ideas and tips that other riders have had while on the road.

Date: 18 Nov 1996
Name: Dyan Townsend
Country: USA
Email: oberon22@ix.netcom.com
Comments: In July of this year I sailed to Gotland, an island off the coast of Sweden in the middle of the Baltic, for an idyllic week long trip. In Sweden wild camping is free and Gotland is brimming with secluded forests, sand dunes, pristine beaches! , old stone churches, neolithic ruins of stone ships, even treasure from the days of the Hanseatic League. The island also receivees more sunshine than anywhere else on Sweden. There are tiny fishing villages dispersed across the island, excellent seaf! ood, organic vegetables and herbs. There are wild orchids, fantastic limestone formations, rare ponies, poppies and viper's bugloss. Cycle touring is exceedingly popular amongst the Swedish people, who can be a bit reserved, but are very helpful and speak excellent English. And if you go during the summer you can ride almost 24 hours a day!!!!

Date: 02 Feb 1997
Name: Stefan Zager
Country: U.S.A.
Email: olivier@grin.net
Comments: I spent five months of 1995 touring Europe, camping and all, mostly alone. The areas that I highly reccomend are:

Along the Rhine, from Bonn to Frankfurt. There's a bicycle-only trail that hugs the bank of the river the entire way.

Through the Bavarian forest

Around the foothills of the Austrian Alps, from Salzburg to Vienna, and especially to the many lakes in the region.

Give northern Italy a miss, and head straight for Tuscany.

Along the Riviera, from Rome to Barcelona.

Most of the locals were very amenable to me camping on their property, and even most hotels and pensions were willing to give me a place to stow my gear. I don't have the stamina to include a full list of helpful tips, but I do reccomend one piece of gear: a simple, square- cut poncho, which you can lay over rear panniers, with the bicycle seat under the hood. If you tie the corners down securely, it will keep your equipment very dry, and won't flap in the wind.

My bike, incidentally, is a Miyata 700GT steel touring frame, with Blackburn racks and Jandd bags.

I'm interested in planning future tours. I would especially like to do a cross-U.S.A. tour, west to east, through the south and up the Eastern Seaboard; and the southeast Asian penninsula (Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, etc.). If anyone has useful information about touring these places, or is looking for a partner for such a trip, I am eager to hear from them. Also, I am continually interested in working for a bicycle touring company in any capacity, so I am soliciting any contact from touring professionals.

Date: 16 March 1997
Name: Christopher Grinton
Country: currently - Germany
Email: cgrinton@boehringer-ingelheim.

Comments: Planning Karakoram highway trip mid-year - 3 weeks approx., robably from rawalpindi (pakistan) to kashgar (southern china). Anyone interested?.

Back to LYF Cycle home page....

Page maintained by Two Wheel Computing,