Cycling travel tips, resources and product reviews
After the let-downs of Stage 16 and Stage 17 (at least in terms of photos, and compared to last year), we headed into Salies-de-Béarn for the start of the 2010 TDF Stage 18. We dropped Andrew off at the Pau train station (which by the way has the BEST croissants I have ever had, EVER […]
Pyrenees self contained accommodation for cyclists This is a great little place providing self contained accommodation in the Pyrenees for cyclists. Name of Place: Laé de Haut Type of Tip: Hotel/Motel Website: http://www.selfcatering-pyrenees.com/ Street Address: None Suburb/Town: Aramits Major City: e.g. London, Paris etc State/Provence: Aquitania Country: France Zip/Postal: 64570 We stayed here in 2010. […]
Well, sometimes you plan and make allowances and things just go wrong. Our plan for the 2010 TDF Stage 17 was to get to the Col du Marie Blanque, the first climb of the stage and only 30km from where we were staying, and a reasonably steep climb. This would allow me to get good […]
Name of Place: Tapia Restuarante Type of Tip: Cafe Street Address: Barrio de Bormapea, 23 Suburb/Town: Isaba Major City: e.g. London, Paris etc State/Provence: Navarre Country: Spain Zip/Postal: 31417 We stopped in here after riding up the Col du Pierre St Martin and back down again (a tough ride from the French side, a little […]
Stage 16 Tour de France: from the road Well, the irony is impressive. After I wrote in my Guide to Cycling in France, for Tour stages, where you plan to ride up a mountain, you MUST ride up a few hours before hand. I also wrote that you can ignore the gendarmerie. Both of these […]
So, our friend Andrew Clark, who rides under the assumed Dutch name of Oondreuw Klook, won a solo sprint into Bielle yesterday, blasting everyone away in the process. It was a sight to behold and the excellent commentary (in Dutch) lends a certain extra excellence to Klook’s solo sprint breakaway win.
June 2010: Cold, raining Melbourne. “Boy, I can’t wait to get to France for L’Etape. We should be able to improve on last year’s 1800th position. It’s going to be so warm, with lazy days filled with riding, Le Tour and croissants”. July 18th, 2010. 5AM. “Awesome, I can’t wait to see the broken souls […]
Name of Place: Relais Mont Ventoux Type of Tip: Select One Street Address: Le Cours/D974 Suburb/Town: Bédoin State/Provence: Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Country: France Zip/Postal: 84410 test IMG_0027.jpg (39 KB)
How to Plan a Cycling Trip to France Part 6: To Take Bike or Not Take Bike, that is the Question. I get plenty of questions from people wondering whether they should take their own bike to France. This depends on a couple of things, namely: Do you want to lug the bike around airports […]
Australian Data Roaming Plans are very expensive. Update: if you’re an Aussie, you’re allowing yourself to be robbed by Australian telcos, and not in a romantic Ned Kelly-esque fashion. Don’t be a dill and get a data roaming cap. Get a local SIM. Learn more here. And if you’re not careful, you’ll come back to […]
Thanks to Chris H for sending me the following heads-up via email: Emirates wrote to advise Chris that they would allow him to take a maximum of 2 x CO2 canisters inside his bike case. Chris says there is plenty of discussion on bike blogs about whether it’s ok to take these on planes, but […]
In this post I compared four bike travel bags and in this post discuss what I think is the best bike bag for airline travel. You can get the EVOC using the below links. Disclosure: these are affiliate links.< Wiggle + Road bike adaptor kit Chain Reaction Cycles + road bike adaptor kit (RBAK). ProBikeKit […]
In this part of the How to Plan a Cycling Trip to France series, we look at the ins and outs of how to successfully watch a Tour de France stage. The main point I want to make is that you absolutely must get to your vantage points early. The French are completely inconsistent and […]
Introduction Welcome to Part 4 of the How to Plan a Cycling Trip to France series, where you learn how to plan a cycling trip to France for the Tour, Etape du Tour or just leisure. In this post, we look at: Tolls Fuel Food Camping Tolls Tolls are quite prevalent on French motorways (Autoroutes) […]
Click here to read my post which lists the Kapai Puku ingredients as well as shows you how to make your own and save money all whilst having the best cereal for cyclists. Good food = good body = good mind. Seems simple, right? You can’t go smashing epic French rides out without epicly good […]
Thanks to Ashley M for his suggestions for a new post.
Although these are general best practise in general travel, I thought I’d cover them here as well.
In this post I discuss:
Introduction Welcome to Part 3 of the How to Plan a Cycling Trip to France series, where we look at Booking a cycling trip to France. Now that you have an itinerary (you can download and use any of my itineraries, download them here one here), and have chosen your car hire and accommodation options, […]
I thought it would be an interesting case study to look at how we have planned our 2010 trip to Le Tour and L’Etape. I basically have followed the same planning methodology described in the Cycling Through France Guide and in the other posts on this topic…
This is Part 2 in an I-don’t-know-how-many-parts-yet series on planning a cycling trip to France for the Tour, L’Etape or just leisure.
At the end, I’ll do a case study on our 2010 planning, so you can see how to practically apply these ideas to your own trip to get a great outcome.
Ok, so after last year’s D-E-B-A-C-L-E – read more here – I thought I’d save you the hassle and lay my thoughts down for the 2010 edition. I am a hardcore logistics man and hate stuffing about, so trust me on this. If you are travelling with team support (wife, husband, girlfriend, whatever) then IGNORE […]
Cost breakdown – getting to France for the Tour
I thought I’d post a cost breakdown from our 2009 trip to France for Le Tour and L’Etape on suggestion by Liz at Corsica Journey.
So, the damage from 2009, including airfares, accomodation/carhire (campervan), fuel, tolls, food etc is listed below. All prices are in Australian dollars, convert to your currency here. Costs were shared between 2 people. We had an extra 15kg free baggage allowance on Malaysian. If you want a detailed cost breakdown, as well as tips on how to minimise these costs, you need to check out Guide to Cycling through France I wrote.
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 […]
If you head over to wherespresso.com, and do a search on France, you can find some places along TdF route where we found good coffee.
As most Australians know, the Australian mobile market, as with most things telecommunications (and the “market” in general), is highly uncompetitive, particularly in the data space.
No one in the market providea either a prepaid or postpaid data cap. Telstra used to offer one through their Browse Plus prepaid product, but this does not (perhaps wisely) include overseas roaming anymore.