Category Archives: Bicycles

Bike Tour 2022: Rhône and Mediterranean

March 12, 2023 joe Leave a comment

In July of 2022 I had the opportunity to bike tour for a couple of weeks. I bought a cheap bike in Lyon and expected to maybe reach Marseille or Montpelllier. But there were quite strong tailwinds down the Rhône and I ended up in Perpignan before I ran out of time. It was overall an easy tour the main enemy was the heat. The other remarkable feature was that EuroVelo 8 just south of Lyon was quite difficult off road mountain biking. I had a VTT with bikepacking bags, the wasn’t really an issue for me. But several people I met along the way add flat tires or were otherwise surprised by the difficulty.

Bicycles

Bikes and Hiker-Only Trails

October 12, 2020 joe Leave a comment

I’m mostly a cyclist. I’d always rather bike than drive, and usually rather bike than walk. But sometimes, I do go for a walk, and this weekend I went for a hike on the Pomo Canyon trail in the Sonoma Coast State park. When I got there and walked past the no-bikes, no-dogs, no-horses sign, and it changed my mental state: the fact that I would not have watch out for anything other than pedestrians let me relax much more than I would on a multi-use trail. After a mile, I was zoned out into nature, watching a group of deer standing in the foggy morning mist, birds fluttering from bush to bush. It was a great escape from the hectic day to day of work and parenting two small children.

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Bay Area, Bicycles, Travel

Bike overnight: East Bay to Black Mountain Backpack Camp

June 29, 2019 joe Leave a comment

Executive Summary and Recommendations

This is a 24 hour overnight bike trip, starting and ending in East San Francisco Bay, to Black Mountain Backpack Camp on the peninsula.

I took Capital Corridor to Santa Clara on day one (San Jose Diridon would actually be better). There’s not that many trains, so check the schedule (carefully! unlike me) beforehand.

Day one was very unremarkable, through the South Bay suburbs and then up a big road climb to the campsite on Montebello Road. Don’t trust Google if it says you can go through Rancho San Antonio, since that includes three miles of pedestrian-only trails.

Day two was a return over the Dumbarton Bridge to Fremont BART. This was a much more fun day, with some very exciting mountain biking, long descent down Alpine Road, passing through Stanford University and through the wildlife preserves on either side of the Dumbarton Bridge. Fremont has done a very nice job signing the almost the entire way from the bottom of the Dumbarton Bridge to Fremont part.

This is mostly a road trip, but day two has some moderately serious mountain biking. I did it on a touring bike with 35mm tires and moderate mountain biking skills. If you’re not prepared to go over trails that have some ruts roots and rocks on them, then you may want to find another way down it does not go on the Alpine trail.

Although I didn’t plan it this way, what I did – Amtrak->Montebello (uphill)->Black Mountain->Alpine (downhill)->Dumbarton/BART – probably makes the most sense rather than the reverse. More road uphill, more dirt downhill.

When you’re leaving the campsite, keep your warm clothes handy, because you will need them for the descent on Alpine Road.

The trip: day 1

This was a weekend when my wife, our two kids, and her parents went away for a few days. That gave me a break from family life, and an opportunity to be able to go bikepacking by myself. I live in Oakland, California, and had been to a lot of the best-known campgrounds near me on other bike overnights. A friend recently mentioned that the Black Mountain Backpack Camp in the mid-Peninsula regional open space was a very nice spot – it only had four campsites, with four campers per site, so it would never be particularly crowded. Like most camping sites in the Bay Area, it tends to book up; but I used the fact that I don’t work on Fridays to book a Friday night.

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Bay Area, Bicycles

/r/BAbikeTag5

July 22, 2018 joe Leave a comment

Bicycles, Travel

Forest, Beach, and River: A Solo Bike Tour of Normandy

May 9, 2018 joe Leave a comment

[Note: this is a long (but entertaining) story. If you’re just here for the pictures, here’s the gallery , or scroll to the bottom]

Preface: April 2017. This trip happened in July and August of 2017, but its story began in April. My wife and I had a one-year old, and had recently decided to have a second child. I could foresee the fun of being a family of four, but I was definitely not looking forward to the first year of having two very young children: lots of diapers to change, and not a lot of leaving the house for adventures.

Around that time Suzanne and I were sitting in our living room after our daughter had gone to bed, each doing our own thing. I was reading something about cycling, and I said aloud “I miss bike touring.”

Suzanne and I had gone on a bike touring honeymoon five years earlier, and we had plans to go touring with our children. A newborn, however, is not amenable to that, since most medical advice is to wait until one year old before subjecting a child to the bumps and vibrations of cycling. So when I said “I miss bike touring” it was with a degree of wistfulness, knowing that would probably be a few more years before I could do so again.

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Bicycles, Travel

Map of Normandy Tour

May 5, 2018 joe Leave a comment

This is a map of my tour that is written up in this post. It may not work with all browsers; it did not render for me on a mobile device (Chrome on Android), so if you’re not seeing anything here, maybe try a different device or browser.

Bicycles, Camping, Travel

How To Find Campsites While Bike Touring In Europe

March 29, 2018 joe Leave a comment

I have gone on three bike tours in Europe, mostly in France, but also in Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Switzerland. I just wanted to give a quick rundown of the ways that I have been able to find campsites, and also hopefully attract other people to this page you can tell me what to do for other countries. This is about commercial (or often municipal) campsites, not wild camping.

Wherever You Are: Try OsmAnd.

I have only done this within France, but there’s no reason that it wouldn’t work in other countries except that the data coverage might not be as good. OsmAnd is an Android and iOS application that shows OpenStreetMap data, which is sort of like the Wikipedia of cartography. It also has the best filter to show a particular feature type — like campsites — even better than the online OpenStreetMap.

Last summer I spent two weeks biking a loop in Normandy, and used this method almost every night in order to find a campsite. The main advantage of OsmAnd is that it has a lot of information, so it has both municipal and commercial campsites. The downside is that the data is not necessarily verified. One time I showed up at a campsite, and it used to be a campsite, but had become more like a trailer park. The people living there were friendly so I stayed there anyway. And the other ten times I used it I found a for-reals campsite. The idea is: there’s probably going to be a campsite where they are indicated, but is not guaranteed. Usually I did a quick Google search of the campsite name and town to verify that the campsite would actually be there.

The user interface of OsmAnd is decent but complex and it took me a few tries to figure out how to display campsites on the map. Here’s a video of me showing how to find the campsites using OsmAnd:

French campsites are rated on a star system, which sometimes is included in the OSM data for the campsite if you tap on it. Fewer stars is, of course, cheaper. One or two stars is like a field with a bathroom. Three stars seems to usually have a restaurant. Four stars and above seems to mostly involve kid amenities like waterslides and bouncy houses. Anything campsite that has “municipal” in the title (i.e., run by the town) is usually going to be one star and very cheap (once I found one that was free!).

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone else who has used this method in other countries, and how accurate the campsite data is. Using “drinking water” as the this method is also highly reliable at finding public water spigots, often hidden in plain sight.

Overpass Turbo

This is another OpenStreetMap tool. I’ve only used it on a desktop computer, but it gives a view on the same data. Go to https://overpass-turbo.eu/ and replace “amenity=drinking_water” with “tourism=camp_site”, and then click “Run” and it will find sites in the current viewbox. If you move the map, you have to click “Run” again.

Country-by-Country Maps.

In Germany, another good way to find campsites are ADFC biking maps. The ADFC is the national biking organization for Germany, and their maps show bike routes, bike shops, restaurants, and… campgrounds. They also exist as digital downloads, which requires some navigation of their only-in-German website.

In France, Camping Qualite is a kind of campsite industry association that has its own map. They are usually going to be more full-featured and expensive campsites (so like twenty euros a night, with a pool and a playground).

In Switzerland, the website Schweitzmobil has a configurable map that will show the Swiss national and regional bike routes, and various categories of accommodations. Probably the most useful configuration for readers of this post is showing national bike routes, camping, and farm accommodations.

What others sources for finding campsites for bike touring are there?

Bicycles, Travel

Finding campsites using OpenStreetMap and Overpass Turbo

June 22, 2017 joe Leave a comment

Update May 2018: The OSMAnd application accomplishes this task better than Overpass Turbo; see this post for more info.

*******

Campgrounds make for a quick cheap place for a bicycle tourist (or other tourist) to stop for the night, pitch a tent, and get a warm shower. Sometimes, though, it can be hard to tell where all of them are.

For any given region, there are usually some campground associations or governments that list a certain sets of campsites. However, in planning an upcoming bike tour around Normandy, I wanted to have a single map of campsites that cast a wide net. In Europe, the open-source mapping service OpenStreetMap is quite popular and often is the best source of data for geographical features. It’s not perfect. It is sort of like the Wikipedia of cartography: inclusive, but also prone to the occasional error or out-of-date information. Still, it’s exhaustiveness can be helpful for planning: it will tell you all the places there might be a campground.

To get one particular type of map feature out of OpenStreetMap, the best tool is a service called “Overpass Turbo“. It allows you to make a request for one type of feature, and then shows all of them that appear on the current map. Making requests looks a little bit like computer code, but even folks who are not computer nerds can make simple ones. Like for campsites.

Here are the steps:

Go to https://overpass-turbo.eu/.
Find the geographic region that you want to search in. You can either do that by dragging the map, or typing in the name of a geographical location (state, region, etc.) into the search box on the map.
Replace the entire query box with this (borrowed from this example for parking lots):

<query type="node">
 <has-kv k="tourism" v="camp_site"/>
 <bbox-query {{bbox}}/>
</query>
<print/>
<query type="way">
 <has-kv k="tourism" v="camp_site"/>
 <bbox-query {{bbox}}/>
</query>
<union>
 <item/>
 <recurse type="down"/>
</union>
<print/>

Then click “run”.

The search may take a while. The more territory you had displayed on the map, the slower it goes. A search for all the campgrounds in a city will take a few seconds; a search for all the campgrounds in a region or state will take a couple of minutes or may not complete at all. You may need to reduce the size of the map that is displayed, to make the request in smaller chunks.

You can get a shareable link for the map you’ve created, but it will have to re-run the query when someone else clicks on it. I found it most useful to use the export button to export my data as a GPX or KML file, and then importing it into a Google “My Map“. I then changed the style (click “uniform style”, “All items”, then the little paint bucket) so that the campsites show up as green tents. You can see that map here. Either on Overpass Turbo or in the Google Map, where there is additional information about a campsite, like its name or website, that information will appear when you click on the icon. That can help in evaluating whether the information is current and other information about it. Now as I am planning my route, I can take into account where the campsites (probably) are.

You can also get this information through OSMAnd, which (I’m updating this post after the tour) is what I actually ended up doing most of the time in Normandy. Tap the “layers” icon in the top left, tap “POI…”, tap “Search”, type “camp” and choose “Camp site” (make sure you do not tap “former prison camp” which also shows up and which would be a very different experience). It will initially give you a list of the closest campsites; click on the map-with-pin icon in the bottom right.

Bicycles

Request for Bike Signs at 21st and 21st in Oakland

May 4, 2016 joe Leave a comment

** Update 5/22: it turns out that there is a bike nav sign at this intersection heading south, but it is set back about 200 feet from the intersection, so it is not very visible. Consider moving it closer to the intersection. JMM**

This is a request to Oakland Public Works to put in a bike nav sign on E 21St Street for southbound bike traffic, indicating that there is a bike route going uphill on 21st Ave. I frequently blow past that turn because it is unmarked. This is, as far as I can tell, the main bike-route way to get from downtown to the Dimond district, so I would imagine it would say “Dimond 1.6 mi”. You probably want to also label continuing south on E 21st St, although I’m not sure what the “destination” would be going that way (Foothill Blvd? San Leandro?). Video below at the intersection describing the issue further.

Animals, Bay Area, Bicycles, Birds, Photography, Travel

Bay Trail Bike Birding

September 28, 2014 joe 2 Comments

After reading The Thing With Feathers and then Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, I started being more interested in birds. Then I bought a Sibley Guide, and it got a little more serious.

I’ve always enjoyed the Bay Trail, on several occasions riding SF to Berkeley or the reverse. This weekend I rode from approximately Fruitvale BART to Hayward BART, going through MLK regional shoreline, Oyster Bay Regional Shoreline, and Hayward Regional Shoreline, and I brought my camera. When I’d ridden the trail before I’d often stopped to read the informational signs about birds, and I was surprised that I was able to photograph pretty much all the common birds I’d read about, plus several more. And a bat ray.