Romania
In Romania you can take your bicycle on selected trains. You can search it online on cfr.ro. If there’s a bicycle icon next to the train in your search results, the bicycle carriage is possible. Otherwise you need to treat it as a luggage and might need to disassemble and pack it. This doesn’t apply to the folding bicycles.
General Travel Advice
There are different ways to get around Europe taking your bike with you.
- Cycle!
- Hitchbike (take your bike with you while hitchhiking). It usually takes much longer, but is generally possible. People have also hitchbiked on boats.
- Take a bus. Some buses officially take bikes. Usually you have to take the luggage off, sometimes you have to take off the wheels and pedals and wrap the bike in a plastic bag. Sometimes, the bike is stored in the luggage compartment of the bus, sometimes there is a special bike rack in the end. If a bus company officially takes bikes, it is usually written in the section about luggage on their website. Usually it costs around 10 € per bike. One website where you can search for buses across Europe is Busradar, although it doesn’t know about all the lines. Rome2Rio can also be good to get an overview over the available connections.
In the past, a lot of participants were travelling with their bike across europe. We had different expieriences, it is often somehow possible to take the bike, even if they say beforehand that its not. As long as the bus is not completely filled up. Although, this might include some stressful discussions with busdrivers… But it also happens that people get rejected. If you search for the bus company and ‘taking bikes’, there are always many stories from people about how to do it. We made a table with bus-companys and how they are with bikes: https://calc.rankenste.in/jzc11eny1a (might be a bit outdated). - Extra Tipp for Flixbus: As mentioned before you can take a bike on some Flixbuses. But actually it’s the fewest of the connections where you can actually take a bike with you on a special rack. More often it’s possible to take a bike with you as an oversize luggage which costs you 9€. In this case you have to disassemble the frontwheel and handlebar and wrap the bike in some sort of sack. But it’s a bit more tricky than that. With flixbus, you have to book a ride, and you are only able to call Flixbus EARLIEST 48h before the bus goes to reservate your oversize luggage. The problem is, sometimes they don’t allow oversize luggage, and now you stand there, and have to cancel your ride, book another one and hope to get your bike on that one. But there is a way to increase chance. The thing is, that they never allow oversize luggage on doubledecker busses. During booking your ride, you can check that through clicking on seat reservation, and there you go. Here you can see whether it’s going to be a doubledecker bus or not! If it’s doubledecker, don’t book it and look for a different connection. If it’s not, go for it! A Flixbus employee once told me this trick. I’m not sure why they are only able to tell you 48h earliest before, but maybe the bus size might change. So be carefull, and don’t trust this method 100% :)
Take a train. The regulations are different in every country. On the website of Deutsche Bahn, you can search for connections that take bikes across Europe. For international journeys, you need an international bike ticket, which costs 10 €. Usually, if you take your bike apart and wrap it up, it counts as regular luggage and you can take it on any train without paying for it. For train journeys that cross country borders, it always makes sense to check the railway companies of all countries, as prices might differ greatly. Sometimes, it is even cheaper to book a ticket from a country where you don’t even want to go (a ticket from Berlin to Cologne might cost 89 € with German railways, but a ticket from Prague to Cologne via Berlin might cost only 45 € with Czech Railways, and you can still use it to travel from Berlin to Cologne). Bikes in train in Spanish territory and Bikes in train in Portugal- Find a rideshare. The most known website is BlaBlaCar, although it is commercial and evil. Some German alternatives (that also have international journeys) are BesserMitfahren and Fahrgemeinschaft. Most rides cannot take a bike, but some go with a van and have space. French alternative: LaRoueVerte
- Take a ferry.
Travel groups
Some months before the start of the Biketour, we will put online a registration form where you can sign up to join. That will put you on a participants mailing list where you can contact other people who are also planning to join the tour, for example to organise travel groups.