How long should I plan for a trip around Europe on a bicycle?

Question

We are interested in taking a tour around Europe on our bicycles this summer and we would welcome any ideas/ suggestions on planning the trip, e.g. things we should definately take with us, things that people have used and realised they didn't need them after all. etc. Also, anyone who has done this sort of trip, what is the minimum bugdet we should be looking at, taking into account that we'll probably be mostly camping. Thank you!

Answer 1

i rode around japan (around Fuji San) two years ago on bicycle, we took three months to do it. I took my five year old daughter she was on a trailer. The hardest part was high up in the mountains, trying to deal with the dampness, I would say such a trip is not for the faint hearted. Take a small gas camping stove, i used it to scare away wild bears on one occasion. when you are traveliing by bike it important to keep the weight down as low as possible, especially if you decide to go over mountains, climb mountains by doing this, for every time you climb over a mountain pass you can have the luxury of a down hill ride for one or two days. We rode only as fast as we wanted and camped in some of the most unusual places, a water mill was probably the most memorable.
We ate mostly rice, but carried peanuts and sultanas to help keep our engergy levels up. we often bought food at supermarkets and tried to carry as little food as possible , it tended to go off easy in summer
A good tent is most important, we were caught in a number of typoons, the first one was a wet miserable experience. but you always have warm weather following these storms in summer, so everyting was easy to dry out (except at high altitude).
I took a sandwich toaster, we dumped that half way through the journey, along with our mountain thermal gear after we climbed Mt Fuji.
It was a fantastic journey, was difficult, but well worth the effort.
i have travelled from Tokyo to Nagoya via the Japanese Alps in a previous trip.
My next plan is to ride across Russia and maybe Europe.

Traveling along rivers and canals makes for easy pedaling, ride along the roads parallel to the highways they tend to be safer.
We crossed one mountain range that was blocked by a landslide, we had the road to our selves for 4 days, the most exciting part was climbing over the landslides and the wild bears we met along the way. (Abe touge)
I would suggest going camping before or during a storm, and see how you will ride out a storm, do this before you leave for Europe, i doubt that it is possible to do such a tour without meeting a storm or two, good luck.

Answer 2

I cycled 16,000km throughout western Europe over 20 years ago. It took me a year and a half, and I wasn't really focused on getting too many miles under my belt fast, so it was definitely a sightseeing trip first and foremost and a cycling trip second. My main motivation was to save money, and there's no better vehicle than a bicycle for that. I averaged about 25km per day over the whole trip, but I spent about half of my days sightseeing and not cycling at all, so that means that 50km per day is very easily do-able. 1700km would probably take a reasonably fit cyclist (by which I mean a normally fit guy who is used to cycling, not a Tour de France expert) something like 20 days if he went pretty much full-out every day. But that's a bit tiring for a holiday. If you've done very little cycling, you can easily do 50km per day - start off with short journeys and within a few days you'll be fit enough to do 75km per day quite easily. If you're going for the whole summer, 1700km will allow you to do a nice amount of cycling, take a good amount of time off to stay for a day or two - or more - here and there in interesting towns and take in a lot of the sights too. I envy you. There's no better place to cycle than in Europe. It's a paradise for a cyclist. You'll see a lot more cycling around than you'll see using any other form of transportation. Regarding cost, it's hard for me to judge that. Costs have probably gone way beyond the $10 per day that I had for my trip. I saved money by staying in youth hostels. Europe has a lot of youth hostels spaced very nicely (often about 50km apart) for cycling. They are probably still the cheapest form of accommodation other than a tent. Please contact me if you have any more specific questions. I cycled through 13 European countries and although it was a good few years ago I can probably help with some of the questions you might have. Europe is a very welcoming place for a cyclist. Enjoy!

Answer 3

If you're not going on a race but wish to do some sightseeing, for a tour around "europe" (I'd rather restrict it to the EU-countries, without Belarus, Ukraine and the european part of Russia) plan 3-6 months at least - maybe rather 2 years.

My advice would be to focus on a part of europe (e.g. British Isles, Iberian Peninsula, Italy, ...), and have a look at this page:
http://www.ecf.com/

Answer 4

Europe is LARGE, make no mistake about it. How long depends on which countries you wish to visit and what your pocketbook can afford not to mention how much time you have available. At any rate anything less than a month would be rather superficial.