The Family Bike Touring Guide

This summer saw or first multi-day family bike tour through France, and one of the very first decisions we needed to make – before exploring routes, booking accommodation, preparing our bikes or even starting to train – was whether to do a circular route, ending up back where we started, or doing a linear journey and figure out a way to get back to the start by other means than cycling. We opted for a linear route and personally I’m glad that we did.

After seven days of cycling there was something really satisfying about the sense of achievement when we “arrived” at our final destination, knowing we had completed the whole route under our own steam – we had gotten somewhere. I think that sense of achievement would have been significantly dampened if our final goal was simply to end up back where we started.

Choosing the linear option though left us with a problem – how to get back to the car once we had finished our ride – and our decision this time around was to book places on a train from Bordeaux back to our start point in La Rochelle. Frustratingly, the French train system is quite confusing when it comes to traveling with bikes.

Ultimately when we booked all the accomodation and transport back in May we had two choices. We could book a very expensive train and then pay extra for spaces for each of our bikes, or we could pay a lower fee (around €75 total) to get tickets for a cheaper train which allowed bikes onboard but on a first come – first served basis.

Another thing we hadn’t considered is that French train stations don’t seem to take disabled access quite as seriously as we do in the UK. Despite our best efforts, during our journey today we were confronted by a number of large flights of stairs that we needed to circumnavigate.

We knew today had the potential to be stressful and actually it ended up being another day where we proved that we could work really well together as a team, even in a fairy high-pressure environment. but I’m not going to go into too much detail her about the actual journey as Zak will be blogging about that tomorrow. Instead I thought I would just highlight 3 points that I’m glad we took time to consider before we attempted today’s section of our journey.

1. Consider your gear – fully loaded bikes with panniers are heavy. Do you have the strength to lift your bike(s) into the train (and potentially up/down several flights of stairs? If not, you need a system for getting everything to where it needs to be. Our system was to unload panniers and have Zak carry some gear upstairs then wait at the top while I would carry the bikes up individually and Lara would carry the other panniers etc up over several trips, leaving Maisey at the bottom with any remaining gear until it was all moved. This system worked well for us, but we kind of feel into it through desperation rather than planning it out carefully beforehand.
2. Have a contingency – One thing we did discuss in detail before leaving the accomodation this morning was what we would do if we couldn’t get all the bikes on the train. Ultimately this would mean us needing to split up, with some of us getting the train back to the car while others stayed in Bordeaux with the bikes. The contingency was that whoever took the train would then need to drive the car back down to Bordeaux (a 2 hour+ journey) to collect the bikes and reunite before heading north to our accommodation for the next week. Fortunately we didn’t need to do any of that, but knowing that we had a plan, and that we had all discussed and agreed who would stay and who would go if needed meant that we were quite calm about the whole process.
3. Know your limits – our train journey today went about as well as we could have hoped for, but to be honest it’s been one of the bigger concerns for me throughout the whole 7 days. And despite knowing we had a backup plan, that we’d left plenty of time to get to the station and get our bikes where they needed to be, and even the fact that everything went according to plan. Despite all that, by the time we got the bikes back off the train and out of the station at La Rochelle, it was obvious that we had all been quite tense. And as we mounted our bikes and the tension was finally released we found the next 20 minutes or so was quite stressful, as a few small things got the better of our teamwork and saw Lara and I needing to work hard to stay united and focused as we rode the last mile back to where we had first started 9 days earlier. I know that having a plan (and a backup – hence carrying a tent all week that we never intended to use) means that I can usually relax and enjoy the experience, but actually, a circular route would have avoided the need to rely on public transport at all. Or maybe next time I’d do the train journey but at the start, to get it done and finished before the ride even starts, so that we can then enjoy the journey of cycling knowing that the car is waiting for us at our destination.

So there you go, another interesting part of our journey that I wasn’t expecting to have anything like this much to write about, but maybe some day a family planning a bike tour will come across this entry and it will give them some helpful insights.