Three key things you need to do to survive on a family cycle tour

It’s gone a bit quiet on here lately - though not on Twitter (do you follow us on Twitter yet?) since Rhoda’s surprise rise to fame, which has abated now but continues to keep us busy with spinoff projects and requests to use the film! We’ve got all sorts of things lined up over the next couple of months but it’s robbed us of time to write so much about them. Indeed, the rest of the footage from our Borders training camp has yet to be edited, and has only just been viewed for the first time!

Anyway, in a brief lull at forest school today, I was talking with a couple of the other parents about the read-across between what we do as a cycle-touring family, and other family activities which may not necessarily include bikes! It got me thinking about the three things you need for a succesful bike tour - two of which apply in many respects to any family adventure in the outdoors. 

Round-the-World record holder Mark Beaumont taught us in his films that the three key ingredients are...

1. You need to eat and drink
2. You need to sleep
3. You need to do the miles

Eat, sleep, cycle, repeat. So much more in that than a T-shirt slogan, especially with children. Let's have a look at those three elements, what they mean for us, and how the knowledge and kit we've accrued can be applied to things other than cycle touring! We're going to explore each of the three in a separate post in the coming days, in more detail.

Eat

I've lost count of the number of times I've been for a petrol station lunch whilst on my bike (food of champions, often consumed in the cyclist's dining room, the humble bus shelter!) and upon dumping a pile of overpriced packets often amounting to a 'what not to eat' of cycling nutrition on the counter, I've been asked "any fuel?" - "yes," I say, pointing to the crisps, jelly babies, and Thomas Ivor's usual scotch egg - "this is it!".

Eating is a major part of riding your bike for long distances, day after day. It's something that we have to get right for the adults, and the children, sometimes with different strategies - or, more often than not, we sort the children out and supplement that as the grownups find necessary. You wouldn't set out for an expedition in the car without fuelling it first (ok, we've all tried...) but the human body, particularly in child form, needs careful and adequate fuelling in order to perform.

In order to do that we need to choose and source the fuel, but we also need to store it, carry it, prepare and perhaps cook it, we need something to eat it off, and to dispose of the remains afterwards.

So, two things to sort out - what you're eating, and what you're eating it with/off/cooked by. Is this so much different for us on a non-cycling day out? Not really - except sometimes for portion control! We'll have a look at what we fuel with on the road, and in a separate post, how we carry it, cook it, eat it and dispose of it.

Sleep

A day trip isn't a bike tour any more than a trip that doesn't involve visiting an island isn't a holiday. That latter bit may just apply to our family, in fairness. You get my point, though? A tour is only a tour if you actually go somewhere, and then on to somewhere else another day - unless you're Peter Kay.

Sleeping whilst travelling light as a family has some issues specific to cycle touring, when it comes to packing, but whether in a bivvy bag, a tent, a bothy or a hotel, staying out overnight as a family poses challenges most commonly peculiar to the children, rather than the bikes. You might have a baby who’s still up in the night. Toddlers who refuse to accept it’s night time at all. Perhaps your children are a little older and it’s time for them to sleep in their own room - or move out and leave you to it - after all, Mummy and Daddy are on holiday, too!

Getting the sleep you need, for the whole tribe, is critical to the success of your adventure. It can be a major source of expense and stress in inverse proportion, or at worst, both together! Some people thrive on getting up in the morning and having no idea where they’ll sleep that night; others cannot function without everything being booked weeks in advance. We’ll have a look at different planning and sleeping options - particularly our criteria for family tents you don’t need a car to carry. Sleeping bags and mats. How, where, when and with whom to sleep, with or without a tent. When to bail out and use a Premier Inn, and a bit about the kindness of strangers.

Do the miles

If you’ve eaten and slept well, it’s time to get on with the adventure you wanted to have in the first place! That food, and sleeping kit, is going to want putting somewhere while you do it. We’ve adapted our packing for cycling, hillwalking, canoeing, and even the occasional trip, heaven forfend, with the car! The common theme is finding and using kit you can trust, packing it efficiently and adapting the outfit as your family (and the adventure) changes.

There we go, then. A little series that will be of particular relevance as we get nearer to our big summer challenge for this year - and inspiration for you, our readers, too, we trust! There’s your planning mantra to get started. Apply it to all your ideas to test them…How will we nail down each part?

Eat. Sleep. Ride...  Repeat.

Two's company; three's an aspiration! Buying our first tandem.

The auction had sat at about £125 for a couple of days. We hit the 'watch' button.

A couple of hours before the end, someone bid £155. Unless it went for a song, it was too much of a risk. It was obviously going to clear £200 at the end. We had a chat as I got the barbecue out to cook dinner, and decided we'd leave it. 

3 minutes to go and I sneaked another look. No movement. "I'm going in, just in case", I called to Katie. "No more than £200 and it's worth a punt, right?".

"Go on, then. Nothing ventured...", said Katie, sticking her head out of the back door. 

I put in £205, just in case it was close. Don't tell her, will you. My finger hovered over the button for what wouldn't have been the first entirely futile attempt at an auction 'snipe' lately. 

10 seconds. The house WiFi had better hold up, out here in the garden, or this was going to be upsetting.

I think I actually saw '3 seconds' just as I hit the button, and the screen went blank for a what felt like at least a week.

Eventually, it became apparent that yes, we had just bought our first tandem - a Thorn Voyager - for the princely sum of one hundred and eighty-two pounds and thirty-three pence.

Er, ok... now we've got to fetch it! Not so simple when there was no way I would fit on it, we had no idea if any of the five of us would fit on the back without adaptations, and we didn't have a tandem carrier for the car - the latter would have cost more than the bike.

Our brave but possibly foolhardy plan for Katie, under the weather lately, to make a late night trip to a Luton postcode and cycle home, not just on a bike she'd never set eyes on before, but her first ever tandem ride, and do 30+ miles home in the dark, was eventually cast aside (to our mutual disappointment - we like a challenge!) for the more practical solution of stripping out our people carrier, which was in dire need of a litter-pick anyway.

Luckily, our new purchase fits without too much bother, with the wheels off, and I only bent the mudguard stays very slightly, getting it home. In the same way, I only took a bit of paint off the front door getting it in the house, and Katie and I sat on the settee to eat our dinner, watching 'Gray's Anatomy' through the latest addition to the family, still a bit bewildered at what we'd done.

A bit of work since then, and every single member of the family having sat on it in some way, has proved that Katie fits on the front, Thomas Ivor fits on the back, and we ought to have no trouble adding a trailerbike rack on the back (although the scarcity of spare Islabikes racks is once more, a pain in the posterior) so that together they can tow one of the girls.

Our new tandem (as yet awaiting the decision of the naming committee) is no spring chicken. It's old school bike engineering in many ways; a steel frame, lots of chromed bits; solid, heavy-looking cranksets with a Suntour front derailleur (remember them?) and seven gears on the back. We haven't had a grown up bike with V brakes for quite a while! The paint is thin, and there's some rust. But it's a simple, rugged design, and now the manky bar tape is off, we're on our way.

Katie and Thomas Ivor went out for their first ride last night, and didn't die, so whilst it may be a brief dalliance that leads to a different machine in the end, we have a little project on our hands - and I think it's going to be fun. It will be interesting to see how much we can do with the beast, with things we already have in the cupboard... #PimpMyTandem is born!

Trailerbike Time

One of the peculiarities of cycling with a family, particularly over significant distances, is the array of peculiar and bespoke kit you end up using. With the size of children being an ever-changing feast, one year's solution may well not be the next, and when you have multiple children, different pieces of kit go from irrelevant to indispensable and back on a seemingly reciprocal basis. Having first been used seven years ago, our trailer is potentially about to drop out of use again and we joke that maybe we should have another child so we don't have to deal with saying goodbye to the trailer! 

Watch out for an article soon about the different ways to tow your children.

It's also the case now that our growing family cannot afford to lose load capacity, which for us is more about volume than weight. As Ruth and Rhoda have grown, we need fewer nappies but a bigger tent. Their clothes take up that bit more space, although they need fewer spare sets. They weigh more, but are almost ready to start carrying some of their own weight. It's a moving feast. With the trailer leaving our touring setup imminently, we needed options to claw back some capacity.

Now that Ruth is riding by herself, one tool that is about to come back into play after a few years off is the trailerbike, with which we last rode in 2014 when we traversed the Outer Hebrides - Thomas Ivor's first proper tour.

That first trailerbike, a Trek Mountain Train which we bought off eBay for just £34, did us sterling service, but there's no escaping the significant weight and ungainliness of the thing. We had one of two problems with it of late, particularly the occasion when the folding arm's hinge bolt undid itself and the arm fell off the back of the car - mercifully at low speed in a town with no damage done. Unfortunately, the bolt, which has a rare locking head, was lost; Trek no longer stock the parts. It's been sat gathering dust in the basement for a while, and I couldn't help but feel it was a little more agricultural than the rest of our kit.

When one of the old Islabikes trailerbikes turned up for a reasonable price on the excellent Facebook group, I decided to go for it, with an eye on Ruth's next move. The weight difference is significant, and best of all it mounts to the adult's bike using a bespoke rear rack, rather than the seatpost. Our frustration at the small gauge of the rack (requiring adjustment to our Ortlieb panniers' clips to take up the slack, meaning our fronts no longer fit on the rear for short trips) was more than tempered by the stability of the setup, and the adjustable handlebars, which meant we got Ruth riding straight away, to our surprise.

It was then that progress came to a grinding halt, when our touring bikes (and crucially, that special, not-made-any-more rear rack) were stolen off the back of our car.

The chances of us obtaining a replacement rack were slim-to-none - but first impressions of the trailerbike had been so strong we weren't going to give it up that easily. Only a couple of days later, the children and I waited at the station for Mummy to arrive home having been to the south coast and back after work, on the all stations stopping train, to fetch another identical trailerbike, which was being sold with two racks. We were back to two bikes and two racks, even though it would be a while before we would use them all. I'm so glad we did.

Soon I discovered that for short trips and day rides, I could hitch the trailer to the back of the trailerbike, and we were mobile as a three-up combo. I will admit, it's like trying to fly a freight train when hills are involved, but on railway path, it worked a treat. Ruth got to ride, and if ever she tired, she could jump in the trailer. As it happened, the threat of the latter always caused her to dig deep and keep riding!

As we looked to another year's touring needs, I decided it was probably the right moment to invest in making the trailerbikes ready with a bit of a makeover, and so the #PimpMyTrailerbike project began...

Coming soon: How we rebuilt our Islabikes trailer bikes for touring with the littlest people!