I’ve been preparing to run a mountain bike tour in Georgia with Georiders again this year. We’ve got tours running in June, July, August and September with the current guests. So we are cautiously happy to have had some growth from last year when we only ran two of our major trips with only 2 and 1 guest on respectively. This however, was great experience and was well worth doing anyway.

If you’re considering going on a bicycle tour, then you can faced with a considerable range of options for bikes and equipment when preparing. Depending on your budget, you can go cheap or spend your life savings, but you definitely don’t need to spend a lot of money.

Here I cover a few of the fundamentals: the bike, pannier racks and panniers.

Bike

Near the middle of the touring bike price range is the excellent Surly Long Haul Trucker is an excellent choice for any serious tourer. Surly is a legendary bike company who are known for amongst other things, helping set up the Single Speed World Champs and bringing out the Puggsly - the first mass produced fat bike.

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it

When someone seeks, said Siddhartha, then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing

Napolean Bonapart

The only one who is wiser than anyone is everyone

Mahatma Gandhi

Strength does not come from physical capacity, it comes from imdomitable will

Lyndon Baines Johnson

If we are to live together in peace we must come to know each other better

Augustus Caesar

Hasten Slowly

John Fitzgeral Kennedy

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherver it takes him

I wrote a series of popular articles about preparing for a short, medium or long term adventure cycling tour; about the equipment I needed, getting sponsorship, building an expedition bike and maintaining the bike on the road.

I decided to compile all of these blog posts into a 100 page guide which covers the whole spectrum hoping helping you have an incredible adventure. It covers the philosophy of life on the road and how to make the most of the experience.

Prepare

I spent a considerable chunk of time preparing for our bike trip, Ride Earth. We read about previous expeditions on websites such as 'Crazy Guy on a Bike' ( http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/ ), and blogs like Alastair Humphreys' blog ( http://www.alastairhumphreys.com ) and Janne Corax ( http://www3.utsidan.se/corax-e/ ). We started a collaborative 'Wiki' website and started to write down all sorts of stuff on it from the philosophy of why we were going to kit lists, visa information for each country we planned to visit, medical advice, etc. We researched equipment and came up with possible bike set-ups. We contacted a number of companies for sponsorship. First we emailed, then called, and sent letters. Perseverance and finding the right person to talk to were the most important aspects of finding sponsorship. In the end it became obvious that we could prepare for ever but it wasn't going to help us leave. Setting the leaving date was the most important thing leading me onto the next tip:

Hello! You have probably got here searching for that exact question. That’s great, because I have some good information for you to help with your quest to find the ideal gap year. Are you sick of the lack of  original ideas for your gap year?

Do you wish that you could guarantee yourself a really authentic travel experience? Is the blue branding of STA travel in your university travel agent starting to get kind of sickening? Are you bored of trying to decide between a selection of pictures in a brochure? If so then this may be for you…

I did the overland journey Georgia - England, there and back, two and a half times; about 15000km in total. Overland travel in Europe has it’s ups and downs but is generally efficient and reliable. The trains in Eastern Europe are generally well priced and run on time but some of the the older routes, like the Balkan Express are quite slow. Trains in Western Europe are generally faster, have less character (think curvaceous lumps of grey plastic and retro-futuristic design) and are more expensive.

Hello! You have probably got here searching for that exact question. That’s great, because I have some good information for you to help with your quest to find the ideal gap year. Are you sick of the lack of  original ideas for your gap year?

Do you wish that you could guarantee yourself a really authentic travel experience? Is the blue branding of STA travel in your university travel agent starting to get kind of sickening? Are you bored of trying to decide between a selection of pictures in a brochure? If so then this may be for you…

The Magura Louse disc brakes were a high end disc brake that came out around 2007. Brakes are what the German company’s speciality with a good reputation for performance and reliability. Magura’s five-year no-leak guarantee was at the time unique showing confidence in the product. Based in Bad Urach, Germany, Magura has been a leader in hydraulics engineering and technology for over 100 years [Magura was established in 1893].

Magura innovations have included the first ever hydraulic mountain bike brake [1987] and the first “adjust-on-the-fly” motorcycle clutch lever for off-road racing legend Malcom Smith [1968].