After a long summer break it's now time to tell the story of our short holiday cycle touring in France!
The story starts the night before as we dropped off our bikes at St Pancras station after work. The next day we would take the Eurostar to Paris, change trains, and carry on to La Rochelle on the west coast.
The Eurostar bike policy is quite frankly bonkers! (more on this another time - I can rant on this for some time!) But for now the essentials, for packaged bikes under 120 x 90cm you pay £10 extra to send them as excess baggage with their baggage company Euro Depart. If you want to put them on built it costs £25, not guaranteed on the same train, or £30 on the same train- provided you drop it off at least an hour before and book in advance.
We decided to try and keep it cheap and went for the £10 option. We knew that this would involve some sort of box or bag, which we would either have to carry or dump when we got to France, so I set about the internet research! After reading many other blog posts and scouring online bike shops we found the CTC clear bike bags on wiggle.com at £12 each. We liked the idea that the bags were see through, so baggage handlers may be convinced to take a little more care when they could see our precious cargo inside. However £12 for essentially a large plastic sack seemed a little pricey, so I started looking in to alternatives and found mattress bags! We ordered two double mattress covers from the local bed shop at £10 for two, with the idea that we would use them to bag our bikes for travel, and carry them as extra waterproof sheeting/groundsheets.
When packing our bikes we took both wheels off, and the pedals, and turned the handlebars around. We also covered any delicate bits with plastic bottles (cut to size) ie the derailleur, forks and bottom of the chain ring. Then we covered the bikes and bags in 'fragile' tape, and dropped them off hoping that they would arrive safely in Paris!
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