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.

Lonely Planet Cycling Italy thanks BikeRentalsPlus!

Monica Malpezzi Price, and the staff at BikeRentalsPlus! are thanked for their contributions to the 2009 edition of the Lonely Planet's, Cycling Italy guide. Monica, with the help of others assisted with routes and descriptions for the Emilia Romagna region of Italy. In addition, BikeRentalsPlus! is recommended as a bicycle rental supplier. The Lonely Planet's line of Cycling books are great resources for self supported riders. We highly recommend using them to plan your rides (and there are some great lodging suggestion's as well). But, if you need a bicycle to go along with that ride, check out our bicycles available for rent.

Designing Your Own Bicycle Tour

This post is part of a thread about a Giuseppe Garibaldi "themed bicycle tour" design and implementation in Sicily. To see the whole thread click here.
I've designed a lot of bicycle tours over the last 25 years. Indeed, one of the best things about this business for a geographer is to sit home in Colorado during the winter designing tours and then be able to go pedal the route and see how it came out. This takes practice, though, and I want to tell you an anecdote to warn you about the drawbacks of doing this.

In Sicily now I'm alone. Hence, I've not booked any hotels in advance and although I've got a route in mind I've already varied quite a bit from it. When you are pedaling alone nobody cares where you sleep, how far you ride, or how hard the ride is. That's the biggest drawback of designing your own route for family or friends. Everything needs to be pretty predictable as you'll always get questions such as where do we sleep tonight? How far is it? What's the hotel like? How much climbing is there, and so on.

The parent company of Bike Rentals Plus! - ExperiencePlus! Bicycle Tours has a great tour in the Dordogne region of France that I designed in 1995. But we heard this anecdote from three couples - customers - who came one year on that tour. It seems that the year before six couples had the idea of flying to Paris, renting couple of vans (6 people per van), taking their bikes, and heading off to the Dordogne for their own bike tour. So there they were the first day - they had booked the first few nights hotel, and they went out for ride. But the next day the weather was a little threatening. "Hey," somone said, "it looks clear to the west. Let's drive west for an hour and take a ride."

Now France is a great place to ride a bike - it's hard to go wrong. But it is also hard to just pick a spot and go riding. Those rides take planning, especially where there are 6 couples! It turns out that the three couples who came on our Dordogne tour the following year were so frustrated with the lack of planning, the driving around looking for rides, they decided to come back with a professional tour company the next year to do it right.

The moral of this isn't that you shouldn't designe your own tour. Go for it. But remember that if you have eleven other people to take care of, lodge, feed, and track evey day, you should do some planning. And to do that you probably need local knowledge. Today, many tour operators will design a tour for you for a fee. They might even arrange luggage shuttles to help from hotel to hotel. And some provide the service of recommending and booking hotels.

So, what do you do? Design your own or hire a professional? Above all it depends on your level of risk. Rent a villa and design your own rides locally. That's pretty easy if you get the right villa. Head out on a ride on your own. That carries low risk and high satisfacion if you are ready to jump on the train, make sure you've got your bike. But as you add people, make sure they are game to share the rish with you. Otherwise you are on the line and you'd best get some level of local help to make the most of your trip!

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.