How to Plan a Bike Trip to a Country Where You Don't Speak the Language

These 2013 guides mention enough about bike routes, bike rentals, and city-specific short bike tour companies to get you started:

• Rick Steves’ Germany
• Lonely Planet’s Munich, Bavaria & the Black Forest
• Lonely Planet’s Berlin

Bettundbike [Bed and Bike] is in English, and lists bike friendly hotels and inns. As my budget is modest, I won't use many of them. Instead I plan to camp and stay in youth hostels. That's my choice. I would rather sleep in my tent after riding into town for a one Michelin star lunch, than luxuriate in a nice hotel, and only have enough Euros for a curry wurst at the end of the day.

The official German Tourism Bureau’s Cycling pages offers a guide to Germany’s long routes (100+ to 300+ km), and it’s in English.

ADFC, the German national bike club’s site is packed with information and maps, but you need to read German well, which of course I don’t. The takeaway, though, for any Deutsch-impaired cyclists like me, is that Germans like to ride their bikes all over their country, as well as pop over the borders into neighboring France, Belgium, Holland, etc.

Unfortunately, there is no Lonely Planet cycling guide to Germany.

I’ve used their France and Australia and USA guides to plan rides in these countries. Nor are there any Cicerone biking guides to Germany either. I've used this British publisher's books to plan and/or dream about rides on the Loire in France, or the Way of Saint James, in Spain.  There are, of course, perfectly sound German guides, but they are of limited utility to me as I can’t read them.

Still, I may end up riding pieces of the various German long distance routes, either by accident or design, during my trip. These “wegs”, like the Donauradweg, along the Danube, and the 100 Schlosser Route, which takes you past 100 castles apparently, remind me that I might want to plan a return trip to Germany later, if my first visit proves fun.

Still, I decided to fit in some riding in my favorite country, France, during this trip, because I’ve

1. never been to Alsace or Lorraine, and I think I can fit in a ride around the World War One battlefields at Verdun
2. In 2010 I learned that bikes, indeed, are the Queens of the Road there.

 Months of planning, revisions and thinking  about budgets and logistics result in a neat and tidy summary like this. It covers up the dead ends, impracticalities and bad ideas that I worked through to get to this neat and tidy place.

Given my persistent left ankle health concerns, at first I'd thought of doing a typical backpacker tour of Germany, renting bikes in the towns I visited. Once I ran the figures, though, I realized that bringing my own bike would save me $, and taking my bike on the train would get me nicely from point A to point B. The logistics of packing a bike for air travel to Europe from the West Coast of the USA do seem a challenge at first. But it seems, it's "like riding a bike." Once you learn it you never forget how to do it.

Now, the minute I set my bike shoes down on German soil, I know that things are likely to go pear-shaped, and all my fantastic planning will land in the roadside weeds as I gamely pedal off on another adventure.

This is both the agony and the ecstasy of self-supported bike travel. This is why there are thousands of bike touring companies out there with glossy magazine spreads promising to deliver you a stress-free holiday for $200 to $300/day, excluding airfare and gratuities.

Good luck to them. Self-supported bike touring can be fun too.