Travel Insights

For many reasonably fit cycle tourists, 40–60 miles (65–100 km) a day is a useful broad range. If you need a single figure while sketching an itinerary, begin with 50 miles or 80 kilometres a day—then adjust it for the route, the surface, the weather, the load you will carry and the kind of journey you want.

There is a contradiction at the heart of modern travel. We go somewhere because we want to experience it. Then we often organise our days so tightly that experiencing the place becomes difficult. There are trains to catch, timed tickets, lunch reservations, six saved places on Google Maps and several things we have been told are “unmissable”. By the end of the day we may have seen a great deal.

Planning a long distance cycling journey? This first article in the series provides overview of the main questions you should think through including timing, fitness, daily distances, the bike, the load and accommodation. More on each of these issues over the next few weeks.

There is a moment that happens to every traveller, usually somewhere unglamorous — a bus stop, a courtyard, a queue for bread — when the postcard version of a place falls away and something more ordinary, more alive, takes its place. You stop seeing the destination and start feeling the location: the particular weight of the air, the rhythm of a language you don’t speak, the way locals cross a square that was never built with you in mind.

We do not fly business class to buy a sandwich, and we still queue at the gate for Ryanair like everyone else. But a big long-haul trip is a different thing, and planning our 2026 run to Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong took us a long way down a rabbit hole. Here is what we learned, what we nearly did, and what we did in the end.

Planning a long trip takes time — a surprising amount of it — and we have come to think that is part of the pleasure, not a tax on it. This is how the two of us actually go about it. It is a method, not a rulebook; take what is useful and leave the rest.