November 27, 2011
What We Are Thinking Now: (or not)
Over a month has gone by since the dramatic "Return to Mullan, Idaho", without a report from the Grampies. What are we thinking?
The truth is we have been circling around the various topics in a bit of an unfocused way.
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This is mainly because some of the building blocks we need to march purposefully forward are not yet in our hands. For example, we do not yet have our bikes, so we can not really see what will fit on them and more importantly, what they will fit in to. Maps of Eurovelo bike routes and other European cycling books are waiting for us in Montana. We will pick up the bikes next week and the maps the week after.
Here, though, are the topics we have been sort of working on, with a brief progress report on each. We would love to have input from anyone with more information about these subjects!
1. What itinerary to follow. Where in Europe should we go? We have some pieces of thinking but have not formed a complete plan. Here are the pieces:
We want to stick to level routes by rivers and canals, as much as possible.
We want to follow bike paths, most notably the EuroVelo system.
We therefore like EuroVelo 6, which we would follow from Nantes to at least Vienna.
We like the Enns River route, and maybe would go from the town of Enns to Saltzburg. From Saltzburg maybe we would take a train to Venice, just to see Venice. Dodie's Dad was from Berlin and travelled as a young man in the Lake Constance area. She wants to revisit those places for him.
We like the Rhine River bike route.
We want to cycle in Netherlands and Belgium. We also have friends and family in Paris, Nantes, London, Austria, and Germany (Leipzig).
We want to circle around England.
We know that in the Shengen countries we have 3 months but as Canadians we can be in England for up to 6 months. Our whole trip will be about 4 months, so that means one month or so in England.
With the Bike Fridays we can easily jump onto a train any time.
We would probably arrive and leave in the same city, most likely London, but we are not sure if it is cheaper or not for airfares to do this, compared to arriving in one place and leaving from another.
2. What and where is the cheapest air fare to Europe?
A Grampies adventure always needs to start and end by stopping in with Avi, Violet, and Amelia in Montana and Quebec. So we would do some sort of cycle and train combo for that part. For example, cycle to Seattle, train to Whitefish Montana, cycle or bus to Missoula, return to Whitefish, train to Schenectady New York, cycle to Montreal, or some similar combination. In the end, though, we would head to Europe by air from Montreal, and then return to Montreal.
As a baseline, a return fare from Montreal to London (May 15 to September 11) on Air Canada is about $1350. Amsterdam is about $100 cheaper. Air Canada's web site seems to want more for a one way than for return. Go figure!
The lowest rate we've seen is Air Transat to London, $939 return/ $488 one way.
3. How much do the airlines really want to charge us for our baggage and what is the best way around their high fees.
Air Canada allows one free bag. The next bag is $50. Air Transat charges by the kilo for weight essentially over that of the first bag. A second bag of 25kg would cost $375! However they seem willing to take a bike for $30, even, it appears, if that bike is folded into a suitcase that looks like a $375 bag! It's a total negation of the reason for getting Bike Fridays!
4. What bag will our Bike Fridays really fit in to.
If we are right about Air Transat, we can throw the Bike Fridays into just any box. But for trains in Europe we will prefer to put them into bags. Dahon has a quite nice "stow bag" although they are quite cagey on their web site, not giving the exact size. We think the regular one is about 31x24x13 and the extra large 40x37x4. Bike Friday has a bag that is 34x29x9. These are widely divergent sizes. We have no idea which would be the best fit for us. Also that 13 figure for the width of the regular bag can not possibly be right, since it makes the volume of the regular greater than that of the XL!
5. What is the best way to have cell phone and internet service abroad?
Cell phone providers, like the airlines, have taken the sly fiddling with prices/plans/fares to ridiculous extremes. Some of my favourite bath tub reading is the eight or ten pamphlets describing monthly and prepaid services that represent the best thinking of the various Canadian cell providers on how to extract the most money from consumers. When you look into the European providers, you get an added perspective on just how many tricky ways there can be to simply get a phone to ring or to pick up your email.
Although we naturally would look for free wifi wherever possible, internet access over the cell network is something that came in very handy for us on the last trip. It's not such a big deal if you think the blog can wait a few days until wifi is found, but we are quite fanatical about wanting to update daily. Last trip we often put up a mid-day report and then an evening wrap-up! Our age has something to do with this - we tend to forget what happened quickly if it is not written down. And besides, our loyal following seem to want to hear from us often.
Last time, we used an internet stick in the netbook that was working on 3G and 2G cell networks. This time we are thinking to have the smartphone (Nokia N8) use the cell network to set up a wifi hotspot for the netbook (i.e. "tethering"). So we are focused on the data charges that the smartphone will incur.
Generally, even if "roaming" to Europe from a Canadian provider is available, it will be at actual wtf! rates, with internet usage on a smartphone quoted in cents per kb, whereas the usual quote would be in cents per mb. Folks, that's 1000 times different! The result is possible monthly bills like $7,500 or more!
The friendly (by comparison) folks at National Geographic have a service they call "cellular abroad". After selling you a SIM for $59, that will work across Europe they will charge different rates by country. In France they want $3.36/mb and in Germany $1.04. A domestic megabyte in Canada costs 5-15 cents. So these National Geographic rates are 7 to 67 times as costly. Hey, at least it's not 1000 times!
We think, especially if we fly into London, we will pick up a (free) T-Mobile SIM there (They even have a shop at both London airports.) Then we should be able to buy 200 European mb for 40 pounds per month. That's $CAN .32/mb or just 1/3 of National Geographic's best price.
6. Will the Ortlieb handlebar bags we bought actually work?
With bike bags, waterproofness is our holy grail. In our limited experience, nothing is more disastrous than getting your stuff soaked (especially of course electonics) and nothing is more of a bug than trying to cover non-waterproof bags with some sort of rain cover, or using up space by filling non waterproof outer bags with gear sealed in plastic or in dry sacks.
So when we decided to switch from the BoB trailers - with effective dry sack - to panniers, Ortlieb was our natural choice. We used bikebagshop.com and got the classic model front, rear, and handlebar bags. We feel the roll type sealing models use up a lot of space and time in the rolling, so we got the models with cinch down lids.
We were impressed enough with the Ortlieb brand that we automatically assumed the handlebar bag would also feature the other requirements: flat top surface to put your map on, effective waterproof map case, and durable easy to use mounting system. Foolish Grampies!
We now see that the top surface of the medium sized handlebar bag is neither particularly flat, nor large, and that the map case is a bug to put your map into, move around, or refold.
Here is me trying to open the map case one handed - not recommended in any case, but I needed the other hand to hold the camera. Still you can see that even two handed it would be a bit of a struggle.
We also see (and have now read tons about on Crazyguy) that the mount uses a cable that is prone to failure if repeatedly taken on and off, and that must be removed to split the handlebar - as required to pack down the Bike Fridays we will have.
We only started to look into this about 35 days after our purchase from bikebagshop. They have a 30 day return policy, so maybe we are going to live with these bags. Most who do not like the Orlieb bag like the Arkel. The large Arkel bar bag costs $154, (ok, or $159 at Adventure Cycling: http://www.adventurecycling.org/store/index.cfm/product/323_46/arkel-large-handlebar-bags.cfm ) Yikes.
Another one that looks good is the Banjo Brothers bag. We may just have a look at it as we pass through Portland shortly. http://www.banjobrothers.com/products/handlebar-bags/quick-release-handlebar-bag/
7. How long will our smartphone battery last and how can we have longer cell phone life?
Our hope is to use the Nokia N8 as GPS, wifi hotspot, mp3 player, video player, calculator, compass, and on occasion - phone! With its (theoretically non replaceable) 1200 mah battery it is rated for over 30 hours of music playback, but only 3-4 hours of GPS or wifi use. We will not be able to rely heavily on it if charging becomes an issue.
We talked about putting a generator hub into one of the Bike Fridays, but apparently they are either very costly or if not, (such as with the Dahon one), incompatible with the Bike Friday fork width.
We thought about solar charging, but know this to be very very slow.
So we settled on just carrying an auxiliary external battery pack. The one we chose is the Energiser XP2000. It is small and light, charges the phone by USB and will itself charge through USB (such as from the netbook). The phone can charge directly by USB from the netbook as well, so it's one happy USB connected family. Of course the whole family will starve unless they can get some real power from a wall outlet sometime!
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