How to Plan a Cycling Trip to France Part 1: Initial Planning

Lots of people think a trip to France to cycle and/or follow the Tour can be difficult (and costly) and that you need to book an organized tour.

Read on and I’ll show you why this is not the case, and How to Plan a Cycling Trip to France to suit an economy budget.

If you're not sure, check out my article Self tour or tour group for cycling holidays which answers the question.

Some people, through spirit of adventure, or for budgetary reasons, or personal preference, don’t want to join a tour, and therefore can do it themselves.

If that's you, read on to learn about the initial planning part of how to plan a cycling trip to France.

The Trip

So, your trip comprises a fair few elements that need addressing:

• Planning; initial (rough itinerary, stages, riding, airports)
• Planning; on the road (car hire, accom etc)
• Booking; accom, flights
• Equipment lists; what you need
• On the ground; driving, tolls, camping, hotels, watching the Tour

Let's address Initial Planning first. I'll write this from the perspective of what we did, so feel free to change the order around as you wish.

Initial Planning – Rough itinerary
Our rough itinerary probably consisted of Tour de France stages (if at all), what riding we wanted to do, dates of transfers etc, as well as accommodation options (detailed in later posts).

As a first step, and bearing in mind we signed up to do L'Etape du Tour up the Ventoux on July 20, we picked what stages we wanted to see, and what mountains we wanted to attack.

This resulted in our first itinerary, which you can download and use as you wish from here.

Once we worked out roughly what we wanted to see/do, we could look at airlines.

Airlines
Our airline choice was largely determined by the fact that we were able to access extra baggage for free on Malaysian Airlines out of Melbourne Australia into Frankfurt Germany.

Planning flights is a real pain in the bum, and can be done in two ways: tell a travel agent where you want to go, and let them provide you a list of options (or else if they're smart, a list of the more expensive options), or, you can search lots of different flight routes yourself on the different websites, or a flight aggregator like Webjet or Expedia.

Additionally, baggage considerations play a big part in what airline you fly, so this, coupled with any origin/destination restrictions/considerations, will narrow down your options a bit.

The Guide to Cycling Through France ebook comprehensively covers airline options, baggage restrictions and route information, as well as providing links to all the info you need.

Once you have your rough itinerary and flight/airline options, you need to decide how you're going to get around.

Handy resources:

• Airline 2 letter codes
• The Guide to Cycling Through France ebook
• My 2009 itinerary which you can copy/model etc