Zen and the Art of E-bike Touring

There are three different basic approaches to planning a journey: "Winging It" or taking everything just as it comes, "Day-by-Day" planning where each evening you plan for the next day, and finally "The Schedule" where you lay the whole trip out in advance. Hopefully you know which of these three styles will fit your personality the best, and will plan accordingly.

Winging It: In Denmark, we met a Norwegian bicyclist who was winging it. He just rode each day until he got tired, and then looked for a roadside sign indicating a vacant room available where he could stay for the night. Similarly, we met biking campers who would just stop at the nearest campground or put up their tents in secluded patches of woods at the end of each day's ride. This approach requires a degree of self-confidence plus maximal flexibility and adaptability to changing or adverse circumstances along the way.

Although you can use automobile maps or an automobile GPS (i.e., "SatNav") to choose your route during the day, riding on streets with automobiles greatly increases the danger of your journey. I would strongly suggest either a GPS that has a "bicycle" mode on it, or bicycle-specific maps to help find the safest and most enjoyable possible routes. Bicycle-specific paper maps give some indication of the road surface, steepness of hills, and the amount of traffic to be expected on the roads, AND the availability of bicycle paths completely separate from the automobile road, which are far and away our first preference for bicycle journeys.

Several German companies print such maps either in a standard flat map form or in a booklet of pages that each overlap to show details along a specific route. A few of the Bikeline booklet maps have been translated into English, but most are available only in German. Still, you just need to understand the reference symbols used in the map, which is a very limited subset of German to learn in order to use these bike-friendly maps:

One issue with Winging It is where you will stop each night. Some areas have a wealth of tourist accomodations and other areas do not. Similarly, we found that the available spaces were often booked up on Friday and Saturday nights, but more open on Sunday through Thursday nights. If you can't find accomodations at the end of a day, you face the necessity of pedaling on into the evening to find a place to stop even if you are bone weary and saddle sore. The young and adventurous may not be daunted by such or prospect or be willing to "sleep rough" in the outdoors in such a case, but those of us who are older and stiffer would probably prefer to avoid that situation.

Day-by-Day planning: We fell into a pattern of planning the next day after we stopped for the evening. Our method relied on having Wifi available, which was the case in all but one of the B&Bs and hotels we stopped at. Our sequence was:

The Schedule: Some folks like to have all the details of the trip nailed down before they leave, which eliminates any uncertainty about the daily schedule, although it also reduces or eliminates the possibility for spontaneous changes to the planned trip. One method of planning everything in advance is to join a pre-packaged commercial bicycle tour. Such a tour may be expensive , but all the detail work is done by the tour operators, leaving you free to enjoy the experience. Some of the tours also feature a "sag wagon" with repair tools and basic parts that can also be used to transport broken bicycles or exhausted riders, and it is nice to have such a safety net. We have never taken a group bicycle tour and thus cannot recommend specific companies, but the advertisements I have seen for these tours in Northern Europe sometimes offer ebikes as an option.

If, however, you choose to plan everything in advance in detail by yourself, you should expect to invest a lot of time and effort up front. You should consider the somewhat unpredictable impact that adverse weather like strong winds, cold rain, sleet, or snow will have on your daily range of riding. If you include public transportation in your plans, you should also determine if you can take your ebike on that bus or train, and if you can depend on the exact schedule times for that transport.

In Germany, for example, most local buses accept bicycles, but realistically each bus can only accomodate one or two bicycles, maximum. Local German trains and regional trains also accommodate bicycles in certain sections, but the ICE high-speed express trains did NOT allow bicycles. Trains and buses in Germany run on strict, published schedules based on radio-set clocks synchronized to the split second by official government timing signals. As a result, the trains and buses are dependably on schedule and mostly bicycle-friendly, which would make planning a a bicycle tour including bus/train segments relatively easy. On our last day in Denmark, for example, we rode our bicycles across Lolland and waited over an hour for a ferry, but then used the Schleswig-Holstein train network to return with our bicycles to Hamburg.

In other countries, NONE of this may be true, which would make planning a tightly-scheduled bicycle tour including public transportation very difficult and uncertain. So if you take a Do-It-Yourself approach to planning a bicycle trek in advance, make sure to check if buses or trains allow bicycles and, if so, whether the public transit adheres to any kind of schedule or not. You should also be aware of odd quirks in the local transit such as requiring you to call in advance in order to be picked up at certain bus stops, or whether certain train stops require you to "flag down" the train in order for it to stop, both of which we have experienced on our travels.

If you take this DIY approach you might also consider laying out "Plan B" alternative routes for each day that are shorter or easier in case of inclement weather or other adverse conditions. Based on our experience, I would also recommend scheduling an occassional day of doing Nothing At All; usually we are recuperating, doing our laundry, or just reading and relaxing on those days. We call these "down days" and try to schedule one every fourth or fifth day on long trips, and that seems to help prevent long-term emotional or physical exhaustion or burn out.