Four full-size bikes in a hotel room?

Even in the best hotels, there’s not enough room for everything. First you’re rearranging stuff on the bathroom counter, then pawing through unsorted clothes to get other clothes, then eventually wishing you had traveled lighter and brought fewer things on the trip.

So to make this 1,750-mile road trip even more memorable, we decided to pack differently.

We planned to also stuff four full-size bicycles into every hotel room we visit and photograph the results.

These were the same bikes with 26″ and 700c wheels that we we demoed in Medford, Richmond, and Mill Valley on our Oregon and California trip. (Click photo for better view)

If these weren’t CHANGE bikes, it would have been a disaster. But the difference was evident from the moment we pulled them out of the car and took them two-by-two into the elevator…

No dinged cars or scraped elevator walls. These bikes are travel-trained!

The Hilton in Concord, California

OK, the Hilton was a big hotel room. We even had our own sofa, which felt unusually fancy for us. So it was not surprising that we easily found room for four bikes in the corner by the heater, with absolutely no compromising on space.

Granzella’s in Williams, California

Granzella’s didn’t have as much of a corner, so we split up the bikes three and one on both sides of the desk. Total inconvenience? We needed to move a wastebasket.

The Comfort Inn in Roseburg, Oregon

But perhaps the biggest surprise was the Comfort Inn in Roseburg. While comfortable (as the name implies), it didn’t have nearly the same floor space as the Hilton and Granzella’s. That’s when we remembered that hotels have closets. And just like that, we had full use of the entire hotel room, even when sharing it with three commuting bikes and a mountain bike.

What this means for you…

Traveling compactly isn’t just about airlines and the 62″oversize baggage rule. There are lots of times when space matters–in hotel rooms, cars, cubicles, condos, boats, etc.—and now you’re not limited in your ability to carry comfortable, recreational transportation anywhere you go. Ride everywhere, fit anywhere!

What tight spaces in your life could hold a CHANGE bike?

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