Top Touring Tips

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friedel

New Member
Location
On our bikes!
Denture cleaning tablets work a treat for cleaning your water bottles on tour. Just pop one tablet in each bottle with warm water, let it soak for 15 minutes or so and then rinse thoroughly. Sparkling clean bottles!!

For the women, I really recommend the Mooncup. Sure beats carrying a whole pack of monthly supplies along.

And we both second the advice to not get hung up on distances. We've met quite a few worn out cyclists over the last few months and most of them were just trying to do too much, upset with themselves that they didn't make a particular town on a particular day. Just relax and enjoy the ride, whether you do 10km or 100km a day.
 

Nigeyy

Legendary Member
Old inner tubes are great to use for elastic bands when cut into hoops.

Best use I've found is cutting a fairly thick cross section of inner tube, and putting it around the cyclocomputer and mount -that way the cyclocomputer will never fall off its mounting bracket. I've also used them as elastic bands to keep the cyclocomputer wires nice and tight to the fork.
 

friedel

New Member
Location
On our bikes!
Nigeyy said:
Old inner tubes are great to use for elastic bands when cut into hoops.

Best use I've found is cutting a fairly thick cross section of inner tube, and putting it around the cyclocomputer and mount -that way the cyclocomputer will never fall off its mounting bracket. I've also used them as elastic bands to keep the cyclocomputer wires nice and tight to the fork.

Funny you should mention inner tubes. I was just reading a tip on the tour.tk site and they recommended the inner tube elastic band as an "emergency brake" on your bike. Just fit it around the hand grip and brake to hold your bike steady. We have used normal elastic bands for this, but they break pretty easily.
 

vernon

Harder than Ronnie Pickering
Location
Meanwood, Leeds
Cathryn said:
Always carry loo roll. And wet wipes.

Toilet roll is essential in France. On my recent tour only one campsite out of the twelve that I used provided toilet paper in their toilets. Only two of the camp sites had toilets with seats. Two of the campsite had those awful 'floor plate' designs.
 

Bigtallfatbloke

New Member
Yuck...there is little more offputting to me than a dirty public loo...I carry disinfectant wipes but to be honest if the 'facilities' are unhygenic I would rather find a quiet corner of a foreign field that will remain forever England.
 

friedel

New Member
Location
On our bikes!
vernon said:
Toilet roll is essential in France. On my recent tour only one campsite out of the twelve that I used provided toilet paper in their toilets. Only two of the camp sites had toilets with seats. Two of the campsite had those awful 'floor plate' designs.

It's essential for most of Europe. We are always pleasantly surprised when we find a campsite with toilet paper included in the price. In Germany this was most often the case but in Spain, Portugal, France and parts of Italy it was bring your own, unless we were in a really upmarket campsite.

While on the "gotta go" topic -- a trowel to bury your waste if you have to go in the bushes and/or learning to clean yourself with water is a good idea, so as not to leave mess behind. Or at the very least carry a garbage bag and take your toilet paper with you for disposal elsewhere. Nothing is more disgusting than strolling through a field to find a large circle of toilet paper and human waste just left there, not even covered up.
 

vernon

Harder than Ronnie Pickering
Location
Meanwood, Leeds
Bigtallfatbloke said:
Yuck...there is little more offputting to me than a dirty public loo...I carry disinfectant wipes but to be honest if the 'facilities' are unhygenic I would rather find a quiet corner of a foreign field that will remain forever England.

I hope that such actions follow the advice contained in:

'How to shoot in the Woods'

http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-shoot-Woods-Environmentally-Approach/dp/0898156270
 

CycleTourer

Veteran
Location
Bury St. Edmunds
Got this from a Swiss guy we met touring in Norway last year who said that a Dutch guy told him this tip.

Carry a chopstick with you, very useful to get your chain back on without getting your hands covered in oil!

chopstick.jpg

Used it a couple of times and it works a treat.

Also found it useful for cleaning the mud out of your cleats and moving a washing up greeny around in the bottom of a flask to remove the accumulated grolly snot.

I'm sure there are other uses that you lot could dream up! :ohmy:
 
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