How to Plan and Recce a Cycling Trip

4 days,

800 miles by car,

250 miles by bike,

2 plane rides & 4 train journeys…

That’s what it takes to recce a Ride25 route following weeks of research online, a lot of reading, a lot of dead ends and even more more trial and error.

Finding the best route to travel through a country is a fine balancing act taking into account the following factors and a whole lot more:

• Are the roads safe?
• Is the scenery beautiful?
• Are the roads quiet?
• Are there paved traffic free cycle path sections that we can use?
• Is the tarmac acceptable or will it create major punctures?
• Will the riders be able to navigate with ease?
• What major attractions do we not want to miss?
• Where is there a large enough inventory of hotel rooms?
• Will the hotel managers let the rooms to such a large group , for only one night?
• Are the hotels good enough quality or too expensive?
• Where will we eat?
• Will we get a taste of the best food and wine an area has to offer?
• Are we taking in the culture & history of the area we’re travelling through?
• Are the distances for each day too much for such a cross section of cyclists?
• Is there too much or too little climbing?
• Is the altitude and therefore weather conditions too harsh?
• Are there enough planes flying to the start and finish to take all our bike bags and yet still be economical?

Once we’ve researched a route enough in the office we go and trial the whole route – this is our recce – it’s a lot of fun but also hard work – long frustrating days!

We always try all of our routes before sending people on them on bikes – even our intrepid Ride25 Pioneers that are the first to do our routes in a big group.  This recce involves driving large chunks of the route and cycling all the parts that are on cycle paths and all the hardest stretches.  This involves lots of logistics and trying to take bikes on trains that are not always welcome.  That’s why we’ve invested in some Ride25 Brompton bikes.  We use them to recce the route and it’s easy to fold them up at the end of each day and take them on the train back to where we’ve abandoned the car.  We also take them on the trips as spares in case of mechanical emergencies.

The other most important tools for the recce are our friends at Strava.  Strava has a brilliant yet simple route planning tool that you can now use to navigate using the free Strava Ap.  We use strava to plot the route and often replot it during the recce when the planned route is not up to scratch.  Sometimes the road is just too busy or boring, sometimes local road builders have changed the road and either dug it up or built a wall across it – seriously – this happened three times between Milan and Rome!  See some of our routes in our Strava club HERE

We also use our recce to find the most interesting places for pit-stops, lunches and dinners.  Where is the best view?  Who has the best food?

Who will provide a real taste of the country we’re exploring?   Will we see the best a City has to offer?  We also check out the best hotels and the storage for our army of bikes…

The research and recce is a great adventure but that forms the backbone of what makes exploring the world by bike with Ride25 such a life changing part of your history.

Which one of our amazing cycling holiday adventures do you fancy?  Have a look HERE or see available tours below.