Cycling UK Forum

I live in Portugal and get bothered with dogs on virtually every ride. Although they tend to be of the curious variety rather than vicious I find a squirt of water from my bidon aimed at the dogs face to be highly effective.

A friend of mine arranged to hire a bike with some panniers for a foreign tour to be collected from the airport. However, the panniers didn't arrive with the bike, so we put his clothing in a couple of black bin liners and bungied them to the bike rack. Seemed to work fine. I don't think you could get any lighter or cheaper!

God its really not that bad. Better than most UK roads.

Get some inserts for your shoes/boots and a pair of birkenstocks that should sort of the PF.

The roads around Porto can be very busy. There is a lot of ribbon development especially along the coast. However, as you get away from the centres of population and further inland the traffic dies away. In rural Portugal, drivers are considerate on the whole. The roads are usually of a good surface, although many towns/villages have cobblestones in the centre. The upper Duoro above Villa Real/Pinhao is spectacular. As is the national park of Geres. The roads are tough going though - very hilly/mountainous and can be extremely remote. Take a waterproof and a long sleeve jersey as the weather can be unpredictable in the north - I live in the centre last week was 9 degrees and very wet, yesterday was 32 and sunny.

There is a left luggage at Porto airport. Arrivals are on the ground floor, but the left luggage is on the first floor. A friend visiting me left his hard case bike bag with them no problem. So you should be fine.

You could try wrapping an old inner tube round your bars cut the valve out then a layer of bar tape.

thirdcrank wrote:

borisface wrote:Will using a 47 tooth sprocket mean that the chain scrapes on the ground?

It shouldn't. For a broad comparison, think how much clearance there is under a front chainwheel of that size; a typical BB is a tad lower than a rear axle. You might have to be a bit innovative about how to wind up all the spare chain. Talking of being innovative, it ought to be possible to lash up a 47T rear by bolting a suitable 47T front onto the largest sprocket of a standard freewheel.

Erm I was joking...

Will using a 47 tooth sprocket mean that the chain scrapes on the ground?

I know its a contentious issue but I've had two offs in the last ten years both resulted in a smashed helmet, better a broken helmet than a broken skull IMHO

You could certainly get a stem with a lower stack height. Not sure about the 'top cap' - do you mean the top race for the headset? You should be able to get one with a lower stack height. I'm sure someone will be along shortly with what you'll need.

I've done plenty of European tours with my garmin but I like to have a map as a backup just in case. The mapping is excellent and in many countries - Portugal, Greece, Spain for example far superior to the best paper map available. I plan the route on a day by day basis ahead of time using strava's open source mapping then up load to the garmin. The planning software also gives an altimetry profile so I have an indication of the difficulty of the ride. When I'm on the road, if I change my mind about the route I consult the map and then use the garmin navigate function to navigate from town to town. Generally, this works best if your destination is no more than 30-40kms away from where you are. In 6 or 7 years of doing this I can say that I've never really had a problem.

Portugal is a great country in which to tour - quiet and smooth roads, friendly locals, great weather and cheap. However, with one notable exception, Portugal is a mountainous country and in parts its very mountainous. For the most part, doing 50 miles a day would bag you around 2,000 metres of vertical ascent. The Alentejo is the flattest region and very beautiful. It has rolling hills, an abundance of cork oaks and olives and really lovely towns and villages such as Elvas, Evora, Portelegra, Borba, Vila Vicosa, Marvao, Castelo de Vide, Moura, Mourao, Monsaraz. It is very sparsely populated which means that the roads can be very empty. It is pretty difficult to get to as there are few if any trains. There are good buses though. You might be better heading to Badajoz in Spain and then cycling across the border. Or alternatively getting to Lisbon and then the bus out. One word of warning - it gets very very hot in the summer, regularly 38-45 in July and August.

Although more recently I've tended to plot the whole route of the tour at home before I go and then upload to the garmin, I do always take a map along just in case. If I do have a change of plan then I tend to work out a route using the map (I know how quaint?). I then chose maybe 3 or 4 villages along the route and then use the navigate mode set up with bicycle routing on the garmin to guide me between those villages or towns. I find that this works best if the villages are about 15 miles apart and means that you only really have to consult a map if you can't recall the name of the next destination along your route. In fact before I'd discovered how to plot and download routes, this is how I used to tour.

I think I'd just get some schwalbe marathons and have done with it. They last ages, have great puncture resistance and will cope with most things. Since using the marathons I've only had 2 punctures in three years and both were caused by farmers who had just clipped some blackthorn and not swept up afterwards. They do come up a bit big so a 28c is probably sufficient for road use although maybe a 32c if you're going to be doing a bit of roughstuff. With inner tubes, these can be had pretty cheaply these days, if you shop around, so I tend not to bother repairing anymore (and I used the discards in the garden for tethering trees and the like). The problem that I have found with the park patches is that they tend to lift after a while but good enough to get you home if you run out of tubes.

If you're worried about your tyre levers, when you come to fit the marathons you maybe should have a go at getting them off again as they are tight and will show up any weaknesses in your levers. I punctured last week and I discovered that the plastic on my continental levers had degraded and they just bent back on themselves. Tyre levers can also get brittle after a while and simply snap. I've also got some specialized pry babies which are the best I've used, if they still do them.