Every year since 2011, a team of Evans Cycles riders have made the Tour de Eurobike pilgrimage to the biggest bike show in the world. This year, a peloton from our buying team embarked upon the 1000km ride, and we’ll be sharing videos from their journey soon.
Not with them, but travelling alongside, Pinnacle, HOY and FW Evans Bike designer James Olsen traveled a similar route, alone, with his bivi bag and an FW Evans prototype … here’s his story:
Every year a group of Evans staff from the product team ride from Evans head office to the Eurobike show in Friedrichshafen, Germany on the shores of Lake Constance. It’s a beautiful part of Europe on the border of Austria and Germany near Switzerland.
Tour de Eurobike started in 2011. Joel (head of the product team) suggested we rode to the show. A few of us jumped at the idea and since then the annual event has been a fun ride and at 1000kms over 4 ½ days, a fair test of fitness.
Recently I’ve been focussed on our FW Evans bike project again. We started this a couple of years ago, investigating UK manufacturing. Although a very worthwhile exercise this just isn’t really viable at the moment for the majority of the range. So I’ve had some bikes made with a well-trusted partner in Taiwan and the results have been good. The bikes have a road-tour focus (as was traditionally the aim of FW Evans’ bikes) with a modern take on tubing, geometry and design.
Touring Tour de Eurobike is born
Arrival of one frameset this summer gave me the idea of a more touring-focussed Tour De Eurobike and the bike was built with an SP dynamo hub and ridden with various types of luggage fitted.
A few days before the show my MTB bike-packing bags were packed and loaded onto the bike. The GPS loaded with the ‘official’ 2014 TDE route, a route the team took in 2012 over the Pave of northern France that I wanted to ride, and a couple of optional extras that gave me a more open schedule or a bonus for getting extra miles in.
My ‘Ballon Day Out’ option route included some good-sized climbs (4000m elevation gain over 116 miles) with a mystery off-road / forest track section to link the climbs. It’d keep an element of surprise in the ride but I still had to be at the hotel in time for the show. And to be at the hotel at the same time as the Evans peloton was just a point of pride since I was the ‘tourer’ versus the team’s ‘road bunch’.
The ride started from my home in the Chilterns rather than at Head Office in Gatwick.
It felt great to roll away from my front door as I do on any weekend ride but know that I would be sleeping in a field or woodland somewhere in France that night. I had lightweight bivi gear with me so I had total freedom each day. I had power from my hub for lights and GPS charging so less reason to stop. Would I end up feeling like it was a race and put in 20hr days, or feel like a holiday tourist and just take it easy? No plan, just ride it as it comes.
Along the way I found that some of the GPS tracks I’d included to test the off-road worthiness of my bike were wonderful traffic-free dirt roads, others were flinty, steep and definitely MTB terrain. To try the bike on routes like this at the weekends is one thing but to be fully reliant on your bike when a long way from home is a more real test. So far, gravel or dirt roads were no problem as long as it wasn’t too bumpy –like riding a CX bike really, but faster on tarmac.
I got to the ferry at Dover around 6pm on the first day. 135 miles down. Hilly and with some interesting paths. I filled up on food over dinner with Gustavo, a Chilean scientist who was riding out to Switzerland. He’d ridden to the Arctic Circle and in South America so there was no shortage of trip stories to make it an interesting crossing. We parted among the lorries exiting the ferry in the dark, I headed south out of Calais into the green areas of the map and was surprisingly quickly into hilly countryside.
Around midnight I was looking for a place to sleep and within an hour I’d found a nice bit of woodland only 200yds from the road, made some warm food and got comfy. By 6.30 am I was awake and had the little stove lit to make coffee and hot water for my readybrek mix – essential stuff to start the day.
Day two was wonderful
Waking up in woodland with nothing to do all day but ride is a good feeling and rolling away from your bivi spot, everything packed onto your bike and leaving no trace of your time there, is one of the most liberating feelings I’ve experienced. Good music comes to mind and the sun always seems to be shining a bit brighter at times like that. Later that morning I hit the Pave that northern France is renowned for.
Fun for a while but absolutely brutal if you try to ride it fast, my respect for the hardmen of the Paris-Roubaix went up a lot of notches. Mudguards re-adjusted I rode on.
The day was a fairly long one, I finished the TDE day 2 route mid-afternoon and stopped to eat at a shop. I had just started up a hill at the beginning of ‘TDE Day 3’ GPS file when I heard a rider approach behind me. It was Joel and Mike (Evans MD)! They’d caught a dawn ferry and averaged 21mph to catch the others in the bunch who’d set off ½ a day earlier, then rode on ahead and saw me just up the road.
It was fun that our routes had crossed so early
I was then thinking I’d need to get a few more miles in that day to offset the fact they were moving a good 5mph faster than I was! That evening took me into the rolling hills and intermittent rain of the Ardennes.
By the time I settled down in another field off a quiet road that night I’d done over 190 miles. The GPS read 188 but I was continually forgetting to re-start the timer after stops. It was only a guide and route-finder though and actual totals didn’t matter – apart from wondering if another few miles was worth it to crack a ‘200’. Nah.. not when it’s totally dark on a moonless, remote road after 11pm and you’ve had enough for the day. Stop whenever and wherever you like .. that’s the beauty of solo touring.
Day Three would take me into the hillier area approaching the Alsace hills
The morning was a real highlight of the trip, the biting cold of an early-autumn dawn and mist in the valleys created a really fresh start to the day and woke me up more than the coffee I drank while sat in my sleeping bag, not looking forward to that chilly 10 mins of packing up before warming up again on the bike.
Bar Tabacs with great coffee helped a tired rider get over the rolling hills along the way.
By early evening I’d reached Bruyeres for dinner, the turn-off point from near the end of the TDE day 4 route that would head south to the Ballon D’Alsace and my ‘adventure’ day. I was 100 miles or so ahead of the fixed schedule of the “Drill Squad” (the roadie Tour de Eurobike team) and decided I had time to see what the Alsace would be like. It was a really hilly route so between 8 and 11pm I rode the first 40 miles fairly slowly, full of pizza and frites. I felt like riding on that night but stopped about 5 miles from the start of the Ballon D’Alsace climb. That would make a nice warm-up ride the next morning. I’d ridden almost as many miles as the previous day, but not quite.
Day four started dry…
But the forecast for the east was bad for the later part of the day into the next couple of days.
Riding up the Ballon D’Alsace at 8am with some good music on was great, it’d been a couple of years since I’d ridden an ‘Alpine’ climb and the 4-5kgs of luggage wasn’t enough to make it a chore.
This was around 500m up to 1250m, so not huge and the gradient was a fairly consistent 7% or so, but my legs felt heavy that morning. Good rest is needed on these rides but 4-5hrs sleep in a bivi bag rarely gives you that. The descent was great, as long European descents always are.
Disc brakes and 38C tyres at 40PSI give an exhilarating level of confidence but whatever I ride the odd hairpin always catches me out! Breakfast in the town at the bottom of the descent was a good one, huge pastries and mini-pizzas.
A couple of hours later I’d ridden a few intermediate climbs and hit the mystery section. In search of that halfway between road and off-road I’d mapped out what looked like a rideable network of forest tracks but I suspected that the GPS map and the reality may not match up. In fact, the GPS didn’t even know where north was under the tree cover..
After two hours of pushing, carrying and in places scrambling with my bike, with some riding along the way, I got to the top of the hill with a 500m-plus descent to look forward to. It looked like this ..
But then opened up on a track like this.
Mixed success.
But it’d created some uncertainty on my mind for the preceding 24hrs and I like what that does for a ride.
GPS can make things too predictable some say .. here the adventure came from the potential flaws of GPS and it only made things more interesting. If a little slow.. by the time I’d ridden over the Grand Ballon at over 1300m (amazing descent!) and on towards Colmar where I picked up the start of the TDE day 5 GPS file at around 6pm, I’d done 100 miles all day. My average speed was 10mph as I’d left the GPS running as I pushed my bike through the woods. I’d enjoyed the walk anyway. Colmar was a stop-off for dinner and a re-pack as I expected to need my wet-weather gear to hand sometime soon.
That evening I was feeling a bit run down and the rain has started. Just before starting the climb of the Schauinsland I grabbed some protein bars and fizzy vitamin tablets from a chemist – legs and immune system refreshed for 4 euros. It was going dark, the climb went up to 1280m in increasingly bad weather but I thought it’d only get worse so sat down in bottom gear up the 12% ramps on the lower climb and got on with it. The rest was an easy 5-6% I think and the only difficult elements were the high winds and steady drizzle. Up top past the wind turbines it was blowing hard, but I’d been here before on the 2011 ride and knew there was a shelter there. It was 3-sided and roofed and the wind was blowing the ‘right’ way.
At 9.30pm I decided to stop there to eat, warm up and get my warm layers as dry as I could while considering what to do next. The following descent would be cold and there was a long, steady climb of 500m or more after that, there may not have more than a well-lit bus shelter for the next 30 miles or more and the hills had got to my legs, so I decided to finish early and got my sleeping bag out. I slept well up there and by 3.30am had a coffee brewing. A second coffee that morning got me ready to ride the last 80-100 miles in weather that wasn’t good, but hadn’t got any worse.
Day 5, the home run.
I got to use the bad-weather gear I’d brought along based on the forecasts. A Montane Prism primaloft gilet saved my ride – the climb up from Todnau around 5.30am was stormy, very wet, dark and misty. Atmospheric. The camera stayed in a waterproof bag here and stops were few. But I was still verging on uncomfortable considering that I had another 7 hours to go if I could keep a fair pace and the water was getting in as it always will after a few hours. The gilet under a hooded waterproof kept me from getting a deep chill and around 8am it was less windy, a bit warmer with only light drizzle that looked as if it would clear soon enough, even if it rarely did.
3 milky coffees and excessive cheesy pastry portions for breakfast at a café, over the border back into Germany, a lovely ride alongside the Rhine and soon I saw a sign that made me smile – Konstanz 28km.
Tailwinds in this area can be good and 25-28mph along the lake edge felt good after 700+ steady miles. I was full of beans after an early night and a good breakfast and decided I’d aim to get to the hotel by mid-day – that would mean a ride of 4 ¼ days rather than 4 ½. Anything for a bit of motivation!
Urban Germany can be slow-going though, a feeling that I ‘should’ use the bike paths like everyone else but at 20mph or more that I ‘could’ ride on the roads. Seeing the clock on a church tower at 11.50am with over 6 miles to go, I slowed up and rode on the paths. Ah well. Nice to relax. A ferry across the lake to Meersburg ended the ride nicely, the sun came out and I had a bit of time to reflect on the past few days.
I got to the hotel after another couple of slow miles of taking in the view along a lake-front bike path, at about 12.50pm. Sat by the marina tired and wet but happy I was pleased to see I was first to the hotel. It wasn’t any sort of race but that earned me a point over beers later if needed. (Actually it earned me a unique cake that I’m sure someone will have a pic of somewhere…!).
Then in my tired state I realised two things:
The hour time difference meant I had done the ride in 4 ¼ days after all, as well as enjoying a leisurely finish. But my dry clothes were in the van that was supporting the Peloton that may not arrive for 3 or 4 hours. Logistics fail on my part.. Time to shower, eat and get some rest to let my mind recover before a couple of busy days at the show.
The FW Evans ‘N-R’ had been almost flawless. (N-R – ‘New Randonneur’. Following Frederick Evans’s way of naming bikes back in the 1930s – among the wonderfully-named Steelite, Tour Deluxe and Supercontinental was the mystery ‘R-R’). My tubeless conversion of some very light Pacenti tyres had lead to minor sidewall leaks after the pave battered the bike on day 2 and the use of the spare tubes. The steering with a load on the front wasn’t quite ‘perfect’ on those fast descents. But over 4 long days the 650B tyres were everything that this spring and summer’s day-ride or weekender trip experiments had shown, comfortable and fast in a way that is hard to match. It has a mix of characteristics that I really like. Most of the range will be conventional 700C bikes but there will be a place for a bike like this I think.
Keep your eyes peeled for more updates on the FW Evans range…