How to Plan a Cycling Trip to the Tour de France, Part 6: Equipment List

Despite the fact I’ve written and published a Very Comprehensive and Totally Kick Butt Guide to Cycling Through France, I thought I’d write a series of posts around the topic as well.

In Part 1, we cover the creation of an itinerary (initial planning) involving Tour stages, climbs to do, as well as what airlines you might look at.

In Part 2, I discuss Accommodation and Car Hire choices.

In Part 3, we discuss booking flights, accommodation and car/campervan hire.

In Part 4, we look at on the ground stuff like Tolls, Fuel, Food and Camping.

In Part 5, we talk about following an actual Tour stage.

In Part 6, equipment is looked at. Bike bags (transportation), riding gear and general “stuff” is looked at. Equipment is covered in detail in the Cycling Through France ebook.

Note: I don’t like scarcity marketing at all, so this isn’t shorted content to bait you into buying the ebook. If you see value in a 70-odd page, professionally produced, interactive guide (which you can download a free preview of here), you buy the book and if you don’t, that’s cool too. At the same time though, I won’t replicate all the content in the ebook guide as it’s simply too extensive. So we’ll just cover high level considerations in these posts.

Like Chris says, you won’t die if you don’t buy it. You’ll still be able to plan a great trip to France, but if you buy the guide, you’ll find out the mistakes I made, pitfalls to watch out for, and tips to save money, as well as all the planning info you need in one spot. so it’s up to you.

To Take Bike or Not Take Bike, that is the Question

I get plenty of questions from people wondering whether they should take their own bike to France. This depends on a couple of things, namely:

Do you want to lug the bike around airports and in transport, and
What are your baggage restrictions like

You should check out this post which has a shoot out between a Polaris Bike Pod and Scicon Aero Comfort, which may help you decide how to get your bike to France.

My position is that if you are flying Emirates (30kg baggage from Australia into Europe) or Virgin Atlantic (Erk! Heathrow! But your bike flies free) on the same route, or, if you’re flying from North America (generally 2 x 23kg for all carriers, though watch out for changes to policy, read more here), and want your bike, then take it.

Bike hire is widely available in France, and is not expensive. However, I think having your own bike is desirable, so I make all recommendations on this basis.

However, by not taking your bike, you significantly widen the list of airlines you can easily fly without extra impost for excess baggage. You can read more about airline choices with regard to bike carriage here, or download my Flight Planner for the western EU here.

Bike Bag
Nope, nothing worse than opening your bike and finding your pride and joy has been destroyed by some uncaring baggage handler, or through the travails of your international jetsetting lifestyle.

To save you from this devastating event, I present two solutions.

Either pack your bike in the Polaris bike pod or a Scicon from Wiggle. Both are wheeled and relatively light.

I used the Scicon in 2009, and I thought it was fairly good, though it’s nowhere near as robust as the Polaris. On the Scicon, you must ensure your bike is very securely secured to the internal frame. I’d put bubble wrap on most surfaces. The Scicon folds down and rolls up (into the size of a small dome tent), so it is not in the way in a campervan.

Scicon Aero Comfort

The Polaris is very light and robust. It does not pack down.

Polaris Bike Pod

They’re both wheeled, with the Scicon being a touch more convenient in terms of moving around airports and packing away, whilst the Polaris offers slightly better protection. The Polaris can tend to tip over a little bit as its wheelbase is not quite wide enough, so you’ll need to be mindful of it in the airport – this could be a pain in the neck.

You could of course use a bike box from an airline, and whilst this is a perfectly acceptable means to get your bike on the plane, boxes are really unwieldy and also don’t pack down well for transport in an Audi Supervagon.

Riding Gear
Pack all the usual stuff, but include things like boot covers, rain and wind jackets, warm gloves; you’ll need them all, especially if you’re climbing.

Backpacks
Really, backpacks are a pretty personal choice so I won’t go into them too much here except to say, check out Vaude. They are absolutely kick butt – I have one on my Amazon astore. I also have some camera/kit bags listed here, which will protect any expensive camera kit.

General Stuff
When reading this list, keep in mind I am a gadget nerd, and like to be connected to the net whilst away.
• Map book – this is ESSENTIAL (unless you want an AUD$2100 data roaming bill like I came home to)
• Ipod with TV-out cable
• GPS with Euro maps loaded
• Frame pump – do NOT take CO2 canisters onto the plane
• Compact Flash (CF) or SD card reader plus cable (if required)
• International AC adaptors Chargers
• For watching the tour, it would be highly desirable to have a TV in the van, or at least a USB TV receiver in your laptop (here for Macs, or here for PCs)
• Take energy bars, I use Clif Bars, or plain old fruitcake.
• Get a helmet pod or bag from Wiggle or a Giro helmet pod from Chain Reaction and take it onto the plane or pack in a hard case

Summary
This has given you a brief look at equipment you need to think about, and as always, I can’t cover it as deeply as I do in the 76 page Guide to Cycling Through France ebook, so check that out if you want more information.

In Part 7, we’ll look at: