Where in the world can you find a CHANGE bike?
Adventure
June 1st 2017
Recently, we’ve gotten several questions about outfitting CHANGE bikes for touring. Can it be done? What are the advantages? What model works best?
Based on the photos we’ve gotten from various countries, either the 611 rugged hybrid or one of the mountain bikes (609 or 612) seems to be the most popular, with wide smooth tires edging out knobbies over long distances. Here’s a great example of a fully-loaded CHANGE bike in Iceland…
…and partially loaded trips in the Yunnan province of China…
…or the Tuscan countryside of Siena, Italy.
You can find CHANGE bikes from the humid lowlands of India…
…to the brisk and sunny highlands of Tibet.
What’s so special about a CHANGE bike?
Comfort matters when you’re riding hundreds or thousands of miles on a touring bike. A CHANGE bike requires no sacrifice in this area. It feels like a “regular” full-size bike because it is one, separating it from every other folding bike. (In fact, it’s the only ruggedness-certified folding bike in the world).
But it’s a full-size bike with benefits. You can fit it in a smaller box without disassembling it, so you can go right from plane flight to bus ride with a compact box that fits in airport carts and bus luggage racks. (And if you ship by Bikeflights.com, you can bypass the whole airport, shipping it right to your hotel less expensively.)
It also plays well with trains. (I personally carried three CHANGE bikes on New York City’s Manhattan F Train on my last east coast trip.)
And finally, your can fold it at any moment to fit easily into any size car. Want to extend your trip (or shorten it) with a taxi, Uber, or rental car? No problem…with a CHANGE bike.
In fact, that was the main value for a CHANGE bike owner I spoke to after a 9,000 km trip. He likes exploring the backcountry of other nations, and if anything ever broke, he knew he would never be stranded with his bike, because a CHANGE bike goes everywhere and fits anywhere.
So now that safety is taken care of, what trips are on your bucket list?
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.