Planning a Long—Distance Bicycle Ride
When the Middle-Aged Fat Guys are on rides, we are often asked how we plan our rides and work out the various logistics of putting a ride together. The following is a description of how to plan and execute a long-distance bike ride. We have made some mistakes over the years, but have refined our approach over 37 (and counting) rides. We hope the following is helpful. Thanks to Jim Anderson, the Author.
The Route:Step one is choosing a route. If someone in our group has an idea of where he would like to go, he runs the idea by the group. For example, you might ask your biking friends: how about Adirondack State Park the last week of August next year? With a positive response you start your route planning. Also, by adding a suggested date, you’ll start getting feedback. Begin your planning at least six to eight months in advance. For national parks and popular resorts, you’ll need to nail down the lodging eleven to twelve months in advance.
There are three types of routes: a loop ride, a point-to-point ride and an out-and-back ride. The out-and-back ride logistically is the same as a loop ride. You end where you start, except that on an out-and-back ride, you use that same roads and/or bike-paths both directions. For point-to-point rides, it is best if both points have at least some commercial air service. This allows your group to do routes located farther than driving distance from their homes. For our North Carolina Outer Banks ride, we started in Virginia Beach, VA and ended in Wilmington, NC. Both have regional airports.
Distance:In laying out your route, you need to take into consideration the total and daily distance your group is comfortable traveling by bike. This will dictate the total number of riding days and the total length of the ride. The Middle-Aged Fat Guys are most comfortable with 60 miles per day and will go 75 miles without much grumbling, but scheduling three 75-mile or longer days in a row can get ugly. The MAFG are committed roadies, but not fast – averaging 15 mph. That means 60 miles is four hours on the saddle, while 75 miles is a five-hour day. Most of our rides have been six riding days (with a travel day on each end) making 360 to 390 miles the most common total distances for our rides. The terrain, of course, can impact the total and daily distance. On our Banff to Jasper, Alberta out-and-back ride, we scheduled shorter mileage days to compensate for the elevation gain.
We learned early not to end or start a riding day with a long shuttle in the sag wagon for all of the riders. We recommend you also avoid this, as it is very appealing to start riding at the previous night’s accommodations and ride into the next evening’s lodgings. Of course, we shuttle riders to or from the airport, but work hard to avoid using a shuttle to move riders any time during the ride, except for bad weather. On our Florida A1A ride, we had over an hour shuttle from the Jacksonville airport to Amelia Island, where we started riding the next day.
If you have a major metropolitan area on your route, attempt to schedule the ride through the city on a Sunday. Even if there is a good bike-path system in the city, these systems are rarely complete, and you will find yourself on the city streets at some point. On our Ft Meyers to Key West ride, we got through metro-Miami on a Sunday and traffic was light, as expected.
One last item is lunch during the riding days. As the planner, you will need to suggest at least a couple of potential lunch places each day. This is easy in the eastern U.S. but in the west, there may be no towns, no towns with restaurants, or nothing open at lunchtime. In this case, plan ahead and pick up sack lunches for a picnic before you leave your accommodation in the morning. Most local cafes are happy to sell you a sack lunch.
Route Planning Resources: By far the best resource is Adventure Cycling, a non-profit organization in Missoula, MT, that is entirely dedicated to long-distance bike touring. It publishes a monthly magazine with stories on bike touring, touring bicycles, and how to tips. It also produces and sells detailed route maps for the entire country. Go to www.adventurecycling.org to view the available maps. Most of their routes cover the entire length of the U.S., east to west or north to south, but these routes are broken up into single maps of 250- to 400-mile segments. Local biking associations and tourist information departments also are very good planning resources for cycle touring. Check out the Selkirk Loop in northern Idaho and southeast British Columbia at www.selkirkloop.org, one of the MAFG’s favorite rides.
Another good resource for your planning is Google. Type in a route you are thinking of - say Slidell, LA to Tallahassee, FL. Once the map pops up, click the bike icon above the map and Google will give you one, and often two, proposed bike routes, including bike path, where available. You can modify the Google route to match routes from your other research and break the route into daily segments. By clicking Google Earth, on the bottom of the enlarged map, you can check out the road surfaces and shoulders. Finally, you may want to check with the states’ departments of transportation web sites to see if there is any road construction scheduled on your proposed route. There is almost always some construction. It is more a question of how extensive the construction is and whether or not it will interfere with your ride.
Accommodations:Once you have a tentative route, you will need to find lodging or camp grounds at the end of each daily segment. The locations of towns with available accommodations will dictate the actual length of each segment. This will result in segments of different lengths, and there will be at least one long and one short segment. This problem is more acute west of the Mississippi, particularly in the Rocky Mountain States. The only place we have found in the west with a consistence daily distance between lodging is Yellowstone National Park.
In planning your route, you may find a town that has only one hotel or you have a special hotel that is a “must”, like the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone. Make that reservation first. That way, if the hotel is not available on the day you want, you can move to a day or two later or earlier and adjust the start date of the ride accordingly. After that, fill in the rest of your reservations. Google is a good resource for finding lodging in the locations you want. The MAFG always books, double occupancy, unless only rooms with a single bed are available.
National parks and some resorts require full payment at the time you make your reservations, which is normally fully refundable if cancelled thirty days or more in advance of your check in date. Other hotels require a credit card number and only charge it when you check in, but require a one- or two-day notice in order to cancel a reservation without a charge. It is important to ask about the hotel’s cancellation policy and to get an email confirmation of all of your reservations. Hotels that do not require full payment in advance will allow your group to pay for each room with separate credit cards and will split the room charge between two payors. If you are staying at hotels that require full payment in advance, you should bill each rider in your group in advance and explain to each rider the hotel’s cancellation policy. The good part of this arrangement is that you will have a hard count on who is actually coming on the ride. If we end up with an odd number of riders, we spread the cost of each night’s single room over all of the riders in our final accounting and settlement of the common expenses.
Disseminating Your Route: The final step is getting your route to your group in a usable form. We use Ride with GPS’s web site or app (www.ridewithgps.com) to do this. On this site, you can draw in each day’s route from the start to end point. Ride with GPS will prepare daily route maps with a turn-by-turn set of instructions, and graph the elevation gain and loss. Each segment can be emailed to your group and download onto their Ride with GPS app on a smart phone, or a Garmin or Wahoo bike computer. We have found that iPhones work best, but you will need a Mophie or other battery booster and an iPhone bracket for your handlebars.
Supported or Self-Contained Ride: Except for our first ride with panniers, the Middle-Aged Fat Guys have always used a sag wagon to haul our gear, support the ride, and we have stayed in hotels, even on the first ride. Without a sag wagon, you will need to carry your belongings in panniers (if the panniers are not rubberized be sure to put you stuff in a heavy plastic garbage bag and then into the pannier). For camping, you’ll need to carry tents, bedding, food, water, cooking gear and fuel. If you are not using a sag wagon, you can add these items to the load on your bike, which, in this case, should be a heavier touring bike. Because we have no experience with camping, we suggest you go to www.adventurecycling.org, which can provide you with a great deal of information on camping while cycling. Carrying any additional gear on your bicycle will, of course, slow you down and reduce your daily mileage and/or lengthens your time on the bike saddle.
Sag Wagon:With the exception of our first ride, we have always rented a vehicle or use one of our riders’ vehicles as a sag wagon to carry our luggage, extra water, other drinks, snacks, tools, floor pump, spare tubs, spare tires and an extra set of wheels. Our preference is a fifteen-passenger van, with the back row of seats removed to allow additional room for luggage and supplies. Adding a roof and/or bumper bike rake is also very useful. On a point-to-point ride, we pay the extra drop charge to pick up a van at the first airport and drop it at the end of the ride.
We divide our riders into two or three driving teams, depending on the total number. With two teams, each team drives every other day. The duty drive team divides the day’s mileage by the number of team members. If we have a 72-mile day and six team members, each person drives for approximately 12 miles that day. It is important that the sag driver keeps tabs on all of the riders, who may be spread out over a mile or more. Driver changes often become breaks for the entire ride where riders can get off the bike, fill up their water bottles, get a sports drink, a banana or something else to eat. When the riders are on a bike path, following them in the sag wagon is difficult; however, the Ride with GPS maps show all of the parallel and crossing roads near the bike path, allowing the sag wagon to periodically meet the ride at a crossing road. It’s great to have the sag wagon there with the floor pump when you have flatted.
Your Bicycle: The bike you ride on a long-distance tour can be your own, that you ship, or one that you rent at the starting point of the ride. If you want to use that old friend that you’ve ridden for years or the brand-new model you just got, you’ll need to ship it to the starting point. Shipping is much easier than checking the bike with an airline as luggage; there is no hassle at the airport and, most importantly, the TSA won’t be opening the shipping box and taking the bike out of the container. Either way, you’ll need to break down the bike and pack it in a bike shipping container. We prefer hard sided shipping containers. We ship our bikes by www.shipbikes.com that offers discounted rates and prepares shipping labels (both out and back) for FedEx Ground. Check the FedEx web site for the number of days it takes for a ground shipment to arrive at your location. Add a couple of days to this time line to be certain that your bike arrives before you do. Saturdays and Sundays don’t count in calculating the arrival date.
On shipbikes’ site you can have FedEx pick up the shipment at your home or you can drop the shipment at your local FedEx office. We much prefer taking the shipment to FedEx. We ship our bikes to the first-night hotel. Be certain that that hotel as agreed to accept the shipped bikes before you make your hotel reservations.The first thing upon arriving is setting up your bike for the next day’s ride. It is a good idea for the trip planner to know where the nearest bike shop is in case you need help adjusting your bike or have forgot something. At the end of the ride, the bike will need to be broken down and repacked for shipping home. After the ride on the final day, we normally take all of the bikes to a local FedEx office rather than relying on FedEx to pick-up the next day and the desk clerk on duty to find the packed bikes. If you are on a loop ride, you should be able to make advance arrangements with the first-night hotel to hold the empty shipping boxes until you return the last day of the ride. If it is a point-to-point ride, you will need to ship the empty shipping boxes to the last-night’s hotel (notify the hotel of the shipments in advance). FedEx Ground can normally do this in two days because of the relatively short distance. Keeping the FedEx tracking numbers handy will allow you to manage the entire shipping process.
If this is all too much aggravation for you, renting is a very good option, although, often more expensive. The ride planner should find a local bike shop that offer bike rentals at the starting point of the ride. Communities near good cycling locations almost all have bike shops that rent bikes and the equipment is often new and high quality. A good bike shop at the starting point of the ride is a priority for selecting a starting town. The shop should have a web site where you can see the rental bikes in advance and reserve your bike on the site. Once the ride planner has located the bike shop, it should be up to the individual rider to set up his/her bike rental reservation, which is best done well in advance of the arrival date. Returning the rented bikes is easy on a loop ride but on a point-to-point ride, someone must drive the rented bikes back to the original shop. For some popular point-to-point rides, such as the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal Trail, the bike outfitters in Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. allow riders to pick-up a rented bike in one city and drop it with an outfitter in the other city.
Other Middle-Aged Fat Guy Routes:
Natchez Trace, Nashville, TN to Natchez, MS, 444 miles (99 miles less by ending in Jackson, MS)
Ohio to Erie Trail, Cincinnati, OH to Cleveland & Lake Erie, OH, 336 miles
Crater Lake National Park, OR: Loop from Eugene, OR, 363 miles
Death Valley National Park, CA: Loop from Las Vegas, NV, 299 miles
Southwest Colorado, Loop from Durango to: Creede, Montrose, & Silverton, 386 miles
Pacific Coast Highway, Half Moon Bay, CA to San Barbara, CA, 348 miles
Blue Ridge Parkway, Loop from Washington, DC, 315 miles
Zion & Grand Canyon National Parks, Springdale, UT to Flagstaff, AZ, 417 miles (7 days)
Lake Champlain, Loop from Burlington, VT, 364 miles
San Juan Islands & Olympic Peninsula, Loop from Seattle, WA, miles 332
There are three types of routes: a loop ride, a point-to-point ride and an out-and-back ride. The out-and-back ride logistically is the same as a loop ride. You end where you start, except that on an out-and-back ride, you use that same roads and/or bike-paths both directions. For point-to-point rides, it is best if both points have at least some commercial air service. This allows your group to do routes located farther than driving distance from their homes. For our North Carolina Outer Banks ride, we started in Virginia Beach, VA and ended in Wilmington, NC. Both have regional airports.
Distance:In laying out your route, you need to take into consideration the total and daily distance your group is comfortable traveling by bike. This will dictate the total number of riding days and the total length of the ride. The Middle-Aged Fat Guys are most comfortable with 60 miles per day and will go 75 miles without much grumbling, but scheduling three 75-mile or longer days in a row can get ugly. The MAFG are committed roadies, but not fast – averaging 15 mph. That means 60 miles is four hours on the saddle, while 75 miles is a five-hour day. Most of our rides have been six riding days (with a travel day on each end) making 360 to 390 miles the most common total distances for our rides. The terrain, of course, can impact the total and daily distance. On our Banff to Jasper, Alberta out-and-back ride, we scheduled shorter mileage days to compensate for the elevation gain.
We learned early not to end or start a riding day with a long shuttle in the sag wagon for all of the riders. We recommend you also avoid this, as it is very appealing to start riding at the previous night’s accommodations and ride into the next evening’s lodgings. Of course, we shuttle riders to or from the airport, but work hard to avoid using a shuttle to move riders any time during the ride, except for bad weather. On our Florida A1A ride, we had over an hour shuttle from the Jacksonville airport to Amelia Island, where we started riding the next day.
If you have a major metropolitan area on your route, attempt to schedule the ride through the city on a Sunday. Even if there is a good bike-path system in the city, these systems are rarely complete, and you will find yourself on the city streets at some point. On our Ft Meyers to Key West ride, we got through metro-Miami on a Sunday and traffic was light, as expected.
One last item is lunch during the riding days. As the planner, you will need to suggest at least a couple of potential lunch places each day. This is easy in the eastern U.S. but in the west, there may be no towns, no towns with restaurants, or nothing open at lunchtime. In this case, plan ahead and pick up sack lunches for a picnic before you leave your accommodation in the morning. Most local cafes are happy to sell you a sack lunch.
Route Planning Resources: By far the best resource is Adventure Cycling, a non-profit organization in Missoula, MT, that is entirely dedicated to long-distance bike touring. It publishes a monthly magazine with stories on bike touring, touring bicycles, and how to tips. It also produces and sells detailed route maps for the entire country. Go to www.adventurecycling.org to view the available maps. Most of their routes cover the entire length of the U.S., east to west or north to south, but these routes are broken up into single maps of 250- to 400-mile segments. Local biking associations and tourist information departments also are very good planning resources for cycle touring. Check out the Selkirk Loop in northern Idaho and southeast British Columbia at www.selkirkloop.org, one of the MAFG’s favorite rides.
Another good resource for your planning is Google. Type in a route you are thinking of - say Slidell, LA to Tallahassee, FL. Once the map pops up, click the bike icon above the map and Google will give you one, and often two, proposed bike routes, including bike path, where available. You can modify the Google route to match routes from your other research and break the route into daily segments. By clicking Google Earth, on the bottom of the enlarged map, you can check out the road surfaces and shoulders. Finally, you may want to check with the states’ departments of transportation web sites to see if there is any road construction scheduled on your proposed route. There is almost always some construction. It is more a question of how extensive the construction is and whether or not it will interfere with your ride.
Accommodations:Once you have a tentative route, you will need to find lodging or camp grounds at the end of each daily segment. The locations of towns with available accommodations will dictate the actual length of each segment. This will result in segments of different lengths, and there will be at least one long and one short segment. This problem is more acute west of the Mississippi, particularly in the Rocky Mountain States. The only place we have found in the west with a consistence daily distance between lodging is Yellowstone National Park.
In planning your route, you may find a town that has only one hotel or you have a special hotel that is a “must”, like the Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone. Make that reservation first. That way, if the hotel is not available on the day you want, you can move to a day or two later or earlier and adjust the start date of the ride accordingly. After that, fill in the rest of your reservations. Google is a good resource for finding lodging in the locations you want. The MAFG always books, double occupancy, unless only rooms with a single bed are available.
National parks and some resorts require full payment at the time you make your reservations, which is normally fully refundable if cancelled thirty days or more in advance of your check in date. Other hotels require a credit card number and only charge it when you check in, but require a one- or two-day notice in order to cancel a reservation without a charge. It is important to ask about the hotel’s cancellation policy and to get an email confirmation of all of your reservations. Hotels that do not require full payment in advance will allow your group to pay for each room with separate credit cards and will split the room charge between two payors. If you are staying at hotels that require full payment in advance, you should bill each rider in your group in advance and explain to each rider the hotel’s cancellation policy. The good part of this arrangement is that you will have a hard count on who is actually coming on the ride. If we end up with an odd number of riders, we spread the cost of each night’s single room over all of the riders in our final accounting and settlement of the common expenses.
Disseminating Your Route: The final step is getting your route to your group in a usable form. We use Ride with GPS’s web site or app (www.ridewithgps.com) to do this. On this site, you can draw in each day’s route from the start to end point. Ride with GPS will prepare daily route maps with a turn-by-turn set of instructions, and graph the elevation gain and loss. Each segment can be emailed to your group and download onto their Ride with GPS app on a smart phone, or a Garmin or Wahoo bike computer. We have found that iPhones work best, but you will need a Mophie or other battery booster and an iPhone bracket for your handlebars.
Supported or Self-Contained Ride: Except for our first ride with panniers, the Middle-Aged Fat Guys have always used a sag wagon to haul our gear, support the ride, and we have stayed in hotels, even on the first ride. Without a sag wagon, you will need to carry your belongings in panniers (if the panniers are not rubberized be sure to put you stuff in a heavy plastic garbage bag and then into the pannier). For camping, you’ll need to carry tents, bedding, food, water, cooking gear and fuel. If you are not using a sag wagon, you can add these items to the load on your bike, which, in this case, should be a heavier touring bike. Because we have no experience with camping, we suggest you go to www.adventurecycling.org, which can provide you with a great deal of information on camping while cycling. Carrying any additional gear on your bicycle will, of course, slow you down and reduce your daily mileage and/or lengthens your time on the bike saddle.
Sag Wagon:With the exception of our first ride, we have always rented a vehicle or use one of our riders’ vehicles as a sag wagon to carry our luggage, extra water, other drinks, snacks, tools, floor pump, spare tubs, spare tires and an extra set of wheels. Our preference is a fifteen-passenger van, with the back row of seats removed to allow additional room for luggage and supplies. Adding a roof and/or bumper bike rake is also very useful. On a point-to-point ride, we pay the extra drop charge to pick up a van at the first airport and drop it at the end of the ride.
We divide our riders into two or three driving teams, depending on the total number. With two teams, each team drives every other day. The duty drive team divides the day’s mileage by the number of team members. If we have a 72-mile day and six team members, each person drives for approximately 12 miles that day. It is important that the sag driver keeps tabs on all of the riders, who may be spread out over a mile or more. Driver changes often become breaks for the entire ride where riders can get off the bike, fill up their water bottles, get a sports drink, a banana or something else to eat. When the riders are on a bike path, following them in the sag wagon is difficult; however, the Ride with GPS maps show all of the parallel and crossing roads near the bike path, allowing the sag wagon to periodically meet the ride at a crossing road. It’s great to have the sag wagon there with the floor pump when you have flatted.
Your Bicycle: The bike you ride on a long-distance tour can be your own, that you ship, or one that you rent at the starting point of the ride. If you want to use that old friend that you’ve ridden for years or the brand-new model you just got, you’ll need to ship it to the starting point. Shipping is much easier than checking the bike with an airline as luggage; there is no hassle at the airport and, most importantly, the TSA won’t be opening the shipping box and taking the bike out of the container. Either way, you’ll need to break down the bike and pack it in a bike shipping container. We prefer hard sided shipping containers. We ship our bikes by www.shipbikes.com that offers discounted rates and prepares shipping labels (both out and back) for FedEx Ground. Check the FedEx web site for the number of days it takes for a ground shipment to arrive at your location. Add a couple of days to this time line to be certain that your bike arrives before you do. Saturdays and Sundays don’t count in calculating the arrival date.
On shipbikes’ site you can have FedEx pick up the shipment at your home or you can drop the shipment at your local FedEx office. We much prefer taking the shipment to FedEx. We ship our bikes to the first-night hotel. Be certain that that hotel as agreed to accept the shipped bikes before you make your hotel reservations.The first thing upon arriving is setting up your bike for the next day’s ride. It is a good idea for the trip planner to know where the nearest bike shop is in case you need help adjusting your bike or have forgot something. At the end of the ride, the bike will need to be broken down and repacked for shipping home. After the ride on the final day, we normally take all of the bikes to a local FedEx office rather than relying on FedEx to pick-up the next day and the desk clerk on duty to find the packed bikes. If you are on a loop ride, you should be able to make advance arrangements with the first-night hotel to hold the empty shipping boxes until you return the last day of the ride. If it is a point-to-point ride, you will need to ship the empty shipping boxes to the last-night’s hotel (notify the hotel of the shipments in advance). FedEx Ground can normally do this in two days because of the relatively short distance. Keeping the FedEx tracking numbers handy will allow you to manage the entire shipping process.
If this is all too much aggravation for you, renting is a very good option, although, often more expensive. The ride planner should find a local bike shop that offer bike rentals at the starting point of the ride. Communities near good cycling locations almost all have bike shops that rent bikes and the equipment is often new and high quality. A good bike shop at the starting point of the ride is a priority for selecting a starting town. The shop should have a web site where you can see the rental bikes in advance and reserve your bike on the site. Once the ride planner has located the bike shop, it should be up to the individual rider to set up his/her bike rental reservation, which is best done well in advance of the arrival date. Returning the rented bikes is easy on a loop ride but on a point-to-point ride, someone must drive the rented bikes back to the original shop. For some popular point-to-point rides, such as the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal Trail, the bike outfitters in Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. allow riders to pick-up a rented bike in one city and drop it with an outfitter in the other city.
Other Middle-Aged Fat Guy Routes:
Natchez Trace, Nashville, TN to Natchez, MS, 444 miles (99 miles less by ending in Jackson, MS)
Ohio to Erie Trail, Cincinnati, OH to Cleveland & Lake Erie, OH, 336 miles
Crater Lake National Park, OR: Loop from Eugene, OR, 363 miles
Death Valley National Park, CA: Loop from Las Vegas, NV, 299 miles
Southwest Colorado, Loop from Durango to: Creede, Montrose, & Silverton, 386 miles
Pacific Coast Highway, Half Moon Bay, CA to San Barbara, CA, 348 miles
Blue Ridge Parkway, Loop from Washington, DC, 315 miles
Zion & Grand Canyon National Parks, Springdale, UT to Flagstaff, AZ, 417 miles (7 days)
Lake Champlain, Loop from Burlington, VT, 364 miles
San Juan Islands & Olympic Peninsula, Loop from Seattle, WA, miles 332