If you don’t like long text posts, stop reading now.
This is a scratchpad for thinking I’ve been doing about travel bikes, S&S couplers, bike cases, and related topics (inspired by a lot of recent travel without a bike), to jot it down somewhere outside of browser bookmarks and chats with friends.
Bringing a bike with you on a trip shouldn’t be as expensive and logistically complicated as it is. I’ve been tempted by S&S couplers or the Ritchey Breakaway, two methods of having a frame that you can break apart and pack down into a box just small enough to check as luggage on an airplane, saving fees.
Ritchey:
Some case examples include a hardcase, a backpack case, and a slip cover and cardboard box:
There are also some contrary opinions such as Piaw (a guy who does a lot of bike touring and whose blog I read) opining coupled bike frames are a waste of money and effort.
Hmm. So really, what kinds of traveling do I do or want to do with my bike? (many types, including just 2-3 day weekend trips in the US). And what do I care about? (Mostly time spent and hassle).
Long, multi-week bike tours carrying gear(such as the three weeks I spent biking across the Netherlands and Belgium this summer).
I realized that for this kind of trip, I want my bike (not a rental), but don’t mind dealing with boxing up my existing bike in a cardboard box (remove pedals, handlebars, maybe front wheel) and paying the airline fees– the fees are high but still small compared to the flight and other trip expenses. Plus, on a trip that long I don’t mind discarding the cardboard box when I arrive and then half a day of hassle tracking one down and boxing up the bike before I leave (Amsterdam’s unusual in making this easy by selling bike boxes at the airport, so you can bike the airport and pack it up there).
And I don’t actually expect to do this more than once a year, so a dedicated break-down bike just for this is overkill (and I have to figure out what to do with the case it comes in and so on, especially if I’m flying in to one airport and out of another).
One-week tours in the US (RAGBRAI, Bike Oregon, etc)
When I did RAGBRAI, I shipped my bike via High Country Shipping. They provide good insurance and support, and this worked okay for RAGBRAI (and was really the only option, since the start location was far from the airport, via a bus that didn’t have room for bikes). But I don’t want to do this often– I was stuck without my bike for about a week before my trip to be safe on the shipping (though I have other bikes), and even more– because I work far from home, I can’t easily be around to wait for Fedex to pick up a boxed bike – I had to sit around almost an entire Saturday just to make this work logistically.
And RAGBRAI had a shipping tent set up at the end, but if I were on a self-supported tour, finding shipping supplies and FedEx open could be a pain, depending where I was.
Train + Bike trips
I took a trip with bikes on Amtrak (to Portland and then Glacier Park) once. It was a great trip, and a standard bike in a cardboard bike box worked just fine, and most Amtrak stations have bike boxes you can have or buy (easier than lugging a case around or having to buy one in a nearby city).
There was a moment when it looked like Jack London Square station was out of boxes… but we found used ones. So no special bike or box is needed for this.
Few-day flights to visit people in the US, where I might do some biking
This is what I want a better solution for. If I had a good way to do this, I might bring my bike with me 2 or 3 times a year when I take weekend trips somewhere in the US.
Renting a bike works in a pinch, and I’ve done that in Portland a few times, but if I arrive in the evening the shops aren’t open, and then it eats up some time to get to the rental shop, return the bike when I’m leaving, get from there to the subway/airport without the bike, etc. I’d really rather just have a bike with me from the time i arrive to when I leave. And the rental bikes are terrible, and not really comfortable if I want to do a 50 or 60 mile day ride or carry much.
Bringing my regular bike in a cardboard box is a pain, because I need to set aside time the day I return to find somewhere to get a box (and either lug the box back to where I’m staying or to the airport, or box up my bike right there in the bike shop and then lug it to the airport). On a short trip, this takes up an annoying amount of time.
Having a bike with S&S couplers or so on could work for this– though if the bike’s transported in a hard case, I either have to stow the hard case at the airport until I return (not always possible due to security), or have to bring the bike in its case to wherever I’m staying and then unpack and build the bike there. That could work. Or soft cases I could remove at the airport and then carry with me, such as the ones shown earlier.
Another option here is to buy a folding bike and take that with me on trips. My main concern about that is having a bike I’d be happy to ride a lot (and maybe take on a 40-mile day ride outside of a city). I think this rules out most 20" wheel bikes such as the otherwise popular Bike Friday Tikit, but there are many other bike options (Brompton, Birdie, Dahon though those seem to be mostly heavier and less nice, Bike Friday New World Tourist, which I’ve read rides quite well, though $2k for an occasional trip bike is steep…) And I’ll admit, as little as I care about appearances, folding bikes just rub me the wrong way at some visceral level. I’m not sure why.
My last thought was to get some sort of soft case to hold my existing bike. I’d end up paying the exorbitant airline bike fees for oversize luggage, but it takes a lot of bike fees to add up to the cost of a specialty break-down bike.
Plus, reassembly of the bike would be much faster than with S&S couplers, and if the case were flexible enough to be folded up or carried like a backpack, I could potentially even ride out of the airport (and ride with it back into the airport at the end of the trip). Or if the airport isn’t somewhere I can bike from, I can still more easily carry the bike than if it were in a cardboard box (though not as conveniently as an S&S coupled bike in a case).
I’ve seen many bike hardcases, but then where do you stow the case?
Some poking around for softcases with some padding/structure turned up two that people were saying good things about, the Pika Packworks (<– a nice review there) or the SciCon Aero Comfort:
Hmm…
I’m leaning towards either the Pika Packworks case or a Ritchey Breakaway + the S&S backpack-style softcase. But I’m sure I’ll keep thinking about it for a while.