You'll Find Flat Rides, Great Food and Wine in Italy's Emilia-Romagna Region

If you think that the Netherlands is the only place for easy, relaxed bicycle rides, think again.  The Art Cities of Italy's Emilia-Romagna are some of the most bicycle-friendly cities in Europe.  Add to that the great food and classic wines of the region and you have a perfect destination for a self-guided bicycle tour.  The cities of Ferrara, Modena, Forli, Cesena, Faenza, and Ravenna all have launched aggressive campaigns to attract bicycle tourists.  The web sites linked to these cities have itineraries, suggestions for lodging, and lots of helpful information for planning your tour.

This region also affords easy access to the foothills of the Apennine Mountains with a little more challenging rides for those who wish.  Add to that a number of "agriturismi" in the region for inexpensive lodging and you are set.  

Bicycle Italy's Lombardy Region

The competition to attract do-it-yourself cyclists is on in Italy as different regions attempt to lure cyclists to explore their region in particular. The Region of Lombardy (around Milan and including north-central Italy from the Po River to the crest of the Alps) has put up a web site in cooperation with Movimento Lento (Slow Travel: They have a series of itineraries by bicycle listed as follows:

Bergamo a Brescia
Brescia a Cremona
Brescia a Desenzano
Lecco a Milano
Novara a Milano
Novara ad Alessandria
Pavia a Milano
Canale Muzza
L'Adda nel Lodigiano

So take a look at the Movimento Lento web site.

The site is in Italian but easy to navigate. The folks at Bike Rentals Plus can help by delivering bikes and advising on logistics.

Bicyle Paths, Routes and Logistics in France

France is arguably one of the best places in the world to ride a bicycle, primarily because of the dense network of rural roads and because of complete coverage of the entire country by Michelin maps at a scale of 1:200,000. Finally, the French government tourist office has provided an online resource to help you plan.

In addition check out the resources on the EuroVelo website.

Surprisingly, despite their centralized government, the French have done a terrible job of helping you find a hotel. There is no centralized data base of hotels in France to help you plan your bike tour. Michelin Red Guides are great, but contain only 60-70% of the lodging facilities in France. Normally they'll leave out the cheaper hotels or pensions - often the ones cyclists are looking for.

Logis de France, however, a marketing consortium of small, private hotels in France has a wonderful online resource where you can search for lodging using an interactive map of France. It is great for planning a bicycle tour. Give it a try!

Lodging and Logistics for a Bicycle Tour in Germany

We wrote about renting bicycles in Germany in an earlier post and we just posted a note on lodging resources for cyclists in Italy. This post will direct you toward planning resources for routes and lodging in Germany.

If you are planning a bike tour in Germany you'll eventually want to look at the Deutscher Allgemeiner Fahrrad-Club, one of the best bicycle advocacy groups in the world.

For lodging for bicyclists in Germany click here. This page is English, but eventually you'll need to exercise that high school German as you explore their site.

For bicycle routes in Germany click here.

For a great resource on bike touring guidebooks, we've written about the German series "Bikeline" in an earlier post.

Villa and Hotel Hub and Spoke Self-Guided Bicycle Tour in Tuscany

A great example of a combination seven-night self-guided tour that involved the hub and spoke concept with hotel changes but mostly three night stays in two different hotels is praised by a customer who just did this in May 2009:

"To Everyone at BikeRentalsPlus:

We just finished our self-guided tour of Tuscany and it was absolutely fantastic! Our bicycles were excellent, and all the arrangements worked perfectly (including the prompt and efficient responses to emails and phone calls during the pre-trip planning stages). Most importantly, the cycling routes were stunningly scenic and mostly traffic-free, far surpassing my expectations. The points of interest were also extremely well chosen, as were the accommodations. The Borgo Tre Rose (where we lodged for the first three nights) was particularly memorable, with an outstanding restaurant and a breath-taking setting, while our visit to the Abazzia Sant’Antima was an unexpected highlight of the trip. After our bicycle tour we visited Siena, Florence, and Venice, but sightseeing in these crowded cities paled in comparison to the experience we had on the bikes, where we had country roads and ancient villages practically to ourselves. It was much more exciting to discover a beautiful Duccio in a quiet church in Montepulciano, or a Giovanni Pisano on a deserted street in San Quirico d’Orcia, than to wait on line at the Uffizi to see more works of art than could possibly be seen in a day (and I say this as a trained art historian). Thanks for a great trip – we will definitely be back next year for more!

Signed,
Prof. MH
Professor of Art
New York State"

This is a great example of someone who wanted the independence of pedaling on their own without having to move daily but who also benefited from the expertise of a pre-designed bike tour. They also benefitted from the logistics which had already been taken care of.

Services provided on this tour included:
1) pre-tour consultation and travel advice;
2) bicycle rental of new, 30 speed Titanium bikes;
3)pick up at the train station, deliver y to the first hotel and bike fitting;
4) hotel bookings for seven nights;
5) pre-designed routes;

The links above explain the different services in detail and the photo shows the villa-hotel this couple used their first three nights.

For details on other options, bike rentals, and other services visit the Bike Rentals Plus!web site.

Resources for Designing Your European Bicycle Tour Route #3 - Books

Our first post introduced the Eurovelo long distance bicycle touring network in Europe and our second post introduced you to critical maps to help you design your tour route. This post deals with resource books - both the good, the bad and the mediocre.

There are 3 Kinds of Bicycle Touring Books

1) Bicycle touring narratives;
2) "How to" books: how to pack, how to camp, how to cook, and more.
3) Bicycle tour route books: there are a small number of really great books in this category. There are lots of terrible books that fit here.

Bicycle Touring Narratives

There are a few classic bicycle touring narratives out there. You should read them, not because they'll help you prepare for your trip, but because they are great travel literature and they'll help get you psyched for your trip. The definitive bibliography of this literature is an ongoing project of Dr. Duncan Jamieson, a history professor at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio. You can see his bibliography here.

But here are a few classic volumes that you might want to peruse:

Barbara Savage, Miles from Nowhere: A Round the World Bicycle Adventure (Paperback), first published by the Mountaineers in 1985. A great narrative of a two-year round-the-world bicycle tour by Savage and her husband. Tragically, the author was killed in a bike/car crash in California right before the book was published.

Andrew X. Pham, Catfish & Mandala, A vietnamese Odyssey (Flamingo/HarperCollins, 2000 and 2001); a memoir by a Vietnamese American who returns to Vietnam by bicycle to find himself. A real adventure in all senses of the word.

Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (first published in 1965). If you don't know Dervla Murphy, this is a great way to start.

Mark Jenkins, Off the Map, Bicycling Across Siberia, (William Morrow and Company, 1992) a great adventure of pedaling across Siberia right after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"How to" bicycle touring books

We're not fans of "how to books." We just don't think that there is nearly as much to be gained from reading something called The Essential Touring Cyclist: A Complete Guide for the Bicycle Traveler as there is in reading some of the more entertaining travel literature cited above. Take a look on Amazon, though, and surf the web. You may find something that strikes your fancy. The following category has more to offer for your planning.

Bicycle Touring Route Books

Watch out! Some of these are great, most are just reruns of "how I spent my summer bicycling across Italy."

Seriously, most bicycle touring books that purport to tell you about bicycling in Italy, France, or wherever, are just a narrative of a ride somebody took. The problem with this kind of book is that they took one ride across Italy, Tuscany, or wherever and wrote it up. That makes them an expert? If I were you I'd want to know the BEST route across Italy or France, not the one John Doe took.

Good route books:
A couple of series of books are quite good, but be careful. The Lonely Planet Cycling Guide Series is pretty good but only if you get the second or later editon! First editions are often no better than Joe Blow bicycling someplace once and writing it up. So scout Amazon.com, for example for anything but the first edition of Cycling Britain, Cycling Italy, and so on.

One great series, and we can hope other series will come out, are the German BikeLine
route guides. These guides combine detailed maps for an entire route along with a step-by-step guide. The focus on some of the classic routes in Europe: Down the Danube, the Moselle, the Rhine, and other river rides.

Some of the Bikeline guides are available in English (the Danube for sure) if you can find them. Otherwise, its worth ordering the German version and using it just for the maps.

You can find the publisher's web site by clicking here. If they cover your region or the area you are headed to, this is your book series.

Resources for Designing Your European Bicycle Tour Route #2 - Maps

Our first post introduced the Eurovelo long distance bicycle touring network in Europe. Click on "route design" in the margin and you'll get all the posts relative to designing your route.

This post talks a little about basic maps for your trip: which maps to use and which to avoid, where to find the right maps, specialty maps, and so on. Later I'll talk about your basic bicycle touring books and why they aren't all that good. Then we'll begin to steer you toward two really valuable resources: 1) interactive online resources for bike route design; and, 2) newer edition publications that combine route notes and maps (available only in very popular bike touring areas).

We often see cyclists pedaling down a busy highway in Italy with a 1:1,000,000 Michelin map of Italy. No wonder that cyclist is on the wrong road. Michelin is French and their Italian maps aren't very good. Plus, the scale of one to a million is way too small (small scale, small detail; large scale, large detail).

For Europe, generally speaking, you want a map at about a 1:200,000 scale. You can get larger scale maps (1:100,000 or even 1:25,000) but to go anywhere on a bike you'd need a pannier full of these maps.

With that scale map you can cover most of a region and with two or three you can get across France, most of Italy, and so on.

Key Maps in A Few Countries of Europe

France: Michelin; regional maps at a scale of 1:200,000
Germany: The German Bicycle Touring Club (ADFC : Allgemeiner Deutsche Fahrrad Club) produces an excellent series of bicycle maps at 1:150,000
Italy: Italian Touring Club (Touring Club Italiano, TCI); regional at 1:200,000 (shown on this post)
(Michelin makes maps of Italy at 1:400,000 but they aren't detailed enough)
Ireland: Ordinance Survey Maps (Irish Government); 1:250,000 (you can cover the whole Republic in three maps; add Northern Ireland with a fourth
Spain: Instituto Geografico Nacional (Spanish Government mapping office) makes a great series by Province (Mapa Provincial) at 1:200,000 (find them in local bookstores or tobacconist shops)
Greece: Greece is tough but DON'T rely on foreign maps; I like Road Editions, 1:250,000 covering the entire country in 6 maps.
England, Scotland, Wales: Ordinance Survey 1:250,000 maps cover the entire United Kingdom (these are the maps generally recommended by the premier British bicycle touring organization, the Cyclists Tour Club - the CTC)

In the USA, of course, you'll be looking at the materials produced by the Adventure Cycling Association.

Later we'll talk about even more valuable resources and other maps. But don't forget the fun part of getting a paper map and poring over it to design your route!

Designing Your European Bicycle Tour Route #1 - Eurovelo

So, you're headed off to do a bike tour of Europe and you'd like to begin designing your route. Indeed, that's half the fun! This post will give you a few ideas and resources on how to start.

The Eurovelo Bike Route System as a Place to Begin

The adjacent map shows you a sketch of the Eurovelo bike route system. This long distance route network is briefly described in Wikipedia. But take a look at their web site for a comprehensive perspective.

At completion the Eurovelo network will identify and mark 12 long distance routes throughout Europe. Route number 6, for example follows the Loire River through France, then heads through a corner of Switzerland and into Germany where it picks up the Danube River which you follow all the way to the Black Sea. The great thing about these routes is that you can select a portion and follow it only in France, for example.

Route 6 is currently marked on the ground from Nantes, France as far as Budapest. About a six-week ride. But if you are just interested in a France, German or Austrian portion, it would do fine. The Eurovelo Route 6 website is here.

The web site description isn't comprehensive, though, so you'll need maps to complete your planning. Stay tuned for the next post on the best maps to use for your planning. We'll use the Loire River in France as an example.