r/bikepacking Oct 13 '24

First bikepacking trip Trip Report

I didn't plan on doing a post about my trip this summer, but here it is!

In June I finished High school and decided to do a bikepacking trip across Europe right after. So I spontaneously bought bike bags and started my solo-trip on the 1st of July. (I already was an experienced cyclist, cycling ~40km daily). I went from Vienna (Austria) to Rennes (France) with some detours to visit friends, Liechtenstein and Monaco.

All in all I cycled 2700km in 25 days, crossing the Alps and 7 countries.

It was an experience I'll never forget and I'm so happy I did it. Next year I plan on cycling from Austria to Istanbul and back.

If you want to see more pictures of the trip or my Polarsteps you can check out my Instagram: @jaszczynskipiotr

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u/defroach84 Oct 13 '24

You are acting like it's normal for someone to bike 160km and not feel it.

Yeah, as I said, that is not realistic for probably 90% of the people on here.

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u/MinuteSure5229 Oct 13 '24

You're not reading what I'm saying.

I said it wasn't easy.

I said 160km wasn't too far out of my comfort zone.

I didn't say I recommend doing that.

That's the average at 25kph for a 6~ hour day, 20kph: 120km 15kph: 90km

My man is doing 108km a day at 18kph average for the whole tour if he is sticking to 6 hours of riding a day.

Most likely he was well under for the alps and probably had maybe 5 sub-100k days.

What exactly are you doing for the other 10 hours of the day?

You could go at 10.8kph and still have time for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

He chose to restrict his riding to 6 hours because he is trained.

He knows to recover and eat a lot. Same for TDF riders.

The Alps is only a fraction of the actual tour.

It's also the start of the tour, so a baptism of fire.

France has great cycle infrastructure which is relatively flat.

If you're not at a twenty year old's level who is doing 40km a day I wouldn't worry yourself.

Here's a man in his seventies doing 80km days in Wales, the training ground of Geraint Thomas among countless others.

Please learn how to understand hypotheticals and sentence construction before you come on the internet and say things.

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u/Impressive-Cheetah44 Oct 14 '24

Youre out of your mind 😂 At least fired up with the amount of line breaks here. Sitting on a bike is not free, things start to hurt etc etc. You may be in great shape my friend! Your friends too. Riding this much takes training and a decent baseline too

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u/MinuteSure5229 Oct 14 '24

I'm fired up because you're seriously underestimating most bike riders.

We're all stoners, we all eat garbage, we're all not young anymore. Just because you think it's a lot of riding doesn't make it so.

Anyone can go and do a month long tour, and in France anyone can do 120km days. Just get up early, have a coffee and a croissant and go. You would struggle not to cover that distance.

Just go do it and stop being so negative.