Traveling with a Buddy (Your Bike)

So you’re already planning an amazing Spring or Summer vacation–an active one with your bike that will put that New Year’s fitness goal in high gear. How are you going to get it there? Sooner or later, the reality of bike travel logistics raises its ugly head, and amazing vacation ideas start to slip away.

Let’s get those wonderful vacation ideas back by focusing on getting your bike from Point A to Point B in the United States.

This is a timely topic because we just shipped a bike diagonally across the country from Kirkland, Washington to Orlando, Florida. That’s about as far as you can go and still stay in the US!

Total cost, diagonally across the country: $50. If this figure sounds familiar, it’s the same cost as a full-size extra bag on many airlines.

But in this case, we didn’t need to haul it to the airport, get it through security, get it out of baggage claim, fit it in a taxi at the far end, or anything. We just dropped it off at our nearest FedEx office and it arrived on its own. There are two reasons why this is such a good deal:

1. We shipped from bikeflights.com. They’ve been shipping only bikes since 2009, they’ve got a fabulous deal with FedEx that they pass on to you, and they’ve got a 90+% 5-star customer rating. What’s not to love?
2. We shipped a CHANGE Bike. That means our bike boxes are just 35″ x 30″ x 14″, so they cost half of what other bikes cost per shipment. Which would you prefer, to go anywhere in the country–$50 or $100 per trip?

This is also a maximum. Searching with other cities, we found costs as low as $20 for shipping a bike directly to your hotel.

At that rate, you can afford to take your whole family on a cycling vacation!

Eventually, it still comes back to cars…

So you’ve gotten your favorite bike or bikes safely to your hotel in the destination city.

Normally, what happens now is you get a bike rack somehow, hope it fits on the rental car, and load it up with thousands of dollars of sports equipment that you hope won’t get stolen overnight.

Yes, you love your bike. And it’s not going to live outside. But it still needs to fit someplace convenient.

Either that, you you bring the bikes into the hotel room and try to keep them from getting in the way.

No… a couple more of these might be a problem.

An alternative approach is to keep them in the hotel room overnight, folded up out of the way, if your bike allows it.

Yeah… CHANGE Bikes and people can coexist in a hotel room.

And of course, when you’re driving to those amazing bike trails all across the country — more on that in a later blog — your CHANGE Bikes can ride in the trunk or back seat out of the rain and bug juice. You get to the trail with a fresh bike, ready to have the most incredible vacation ever.

Where do you want to have adventures this Spring?

Bob Forgrave is president of Flatbike, an
ecommerce company offering full-size folding bikes
and kits to make any bike take up half the space.

425-985-6219