Guided and Self Guided Cycling Tours

Cycling tours make for fun vacation holidays for friends, families, and lovers.

When you take a cycling tour, your sense of time slows down and you relax. Even if the countryside scenery is already familiar to you from auto trips, you'll see an entirely different view from the seat of a bicycle.

On a cycling tour, you meet your need for daily exercise as you get from one place to another. There's no need to find a gym, schedule a workout, and take time away from your vacation. Daily cycling burns lots of calories, so you can eat and drink just about anything without guilt or weight gain.

Once you decide where to go, the biggest decision you need to make about your cycling tour is whether you will take a self guided or guided tour.

Self Guided Tours

One of the best ways to take a cycling tour is to take a self guided tour. On a self guided tour, you cycle with your own group of friends of family at your own pace. The self guided tour operator provides you with bicycles, a cycling route and schedule and makes all the necessary provisions for your hotel, luggage transportation, and breakfast buffet.

The bicycle provided will be comfortable and safe, and some tour operators now offer GPS systems on the handlebars. Helmets are not provided, so be sure to bring your own helmet with you.

The tour operator will also provide maps and written descriptions of points of interest along your route. The tour operator also provides a service hotline you can call if you have an emergency on the road, but in general you are responsible for getting yourself to the next hotel by nightfall.

Cyclists are expected to fix their own flats and do their own repairs on self guided tours, but the tour operator will step in with a replacement bike in the event of a complete breakdown.

Guided Tours

On a guided tour, you will be grouped with other tourists and a guide will ride along with you. A second guide drives a support van. Every event is planned and taken care of, including hotels, routes, meals, luggage transportation, and sightseeing excursions. You may bring your own snacks to eat along the route. On some tours, the group pools funds to purchase a picnic lunch, which the guide prepares.

Either Way

Tours usually begin the day after you arrive at the start city and end the day after your last leg of your route. Thus a seven-day event includes just five days of a cycling tour.