Transporting a touring bicycle to and/or from the starting point of your tour

Many people like to bicycle tour in exotic locations far from home.
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Based on the current survey results in the Your next bicycle touring adventure! poll it appears that approximately 33% of respondents depart on bicycle tours that leave from the front door and after some period of time they return to the same place.

The other 67% of bicycle tourers actually start their tours somewhere away from home. For these riders one of the initial challenges that they need to overcome is getting their bike to the starting point and once they have completed the tour they need to return the gear home.

Pat Davis provided this picture of the bike ferry that he and his wife used to cross the Danube at Schlögen, Austria.
Click to enlarge.

16% of the people who responded to the survey used an airplane to get them to their touring location. Others used buses, trains, and boats.

Even the 33% who do circle tours are not free of potential transportation problems if their tours include a short ferry leg (like two of mine have).

The whole topic of getting your bicycle to and from the touring location including how to go about go about it, what to expect and how to survive with everything intact is a large topic worthy of it's own web site. Luckily fellow bicycle tourist George Farnsworth has created a web site that takes on this challenge and does so in an extremely useful way.

George's Travel with Bicycles web site discusses how to go about traveling by all major forms of transportation including airplanes, trains, buses and boats. In addition he has section that describe what to expect when you travel, bicycle routes out of the airports you might visit and if you are a business traveler like I seem to be every once in awhile you can also find a lot of information about where to rent bicycles!

Another useful section on the site covers how to prepare your bike for transport.

I heartily recommend visiting Travel with Bicycles if you are planning a tour that requires you to transport you, your gear and your bike to the starting location.

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