Brussels to Frankfurt on a Folding Bike!

Rojo

At the start of December I flew into Brussels and headed straight for a Decathlon to pick up a folding bike in the attempt to cycle from Brussels to Frankfurt on it.

Here's the little nipper:

https://www.decathlon.co.uk/tilt-120-folding-bike-red-id_8378488.html

I cycled around 450kms and it was literally one of the funniest and most enjoyable cycle tours I've been on. I couldn't stop laughing at myself the whole time and judging by everyone else's reaction to me nipping by, they found it very amusing also!! :P

I put a video of my footage together here:

TheBlaaMan

That was great, thanks for posting. A nice little adventure.......you looked like you had all four seasons to cycle through, but kept on smiling. Well done !

Grassey

Enjoyed that! Well jealous!

How much of that did you actually have to on open roads? From the video it looked to be very little and most of it on proper cycling infrastructure.

Rojo

Deleted User wrote: »

How much of that did you actually have to on open roads? From the video it looked to be very little and most of it on proper cycling infrastructure.

Thanks for the nice comments guys.

I cycled a tiny bit on cycle lanes/roads in Brussels. Some of the locals I talked to gave out about them but they were pretty decent and from my experience they were better than the infra in Dublin.

Pretty much everything else was on proper segregated cycling infrastructure... it was absolutely glorious. The routes might take you on a little bit of a detour but it was so enjoyable and scenery was lovely that the extra KMs were irrelevant. It was a bit of a shock to the system coming back to Dublin!!

I'd love go back and cycle along the Rhine again in the summer... Really, really lovely.

Boscoirl

Class!

Nekarsulm

What a great trip!
Bought on of these bikes yesterday (s/h) they look like fun, and handy to throw into the boot of the car.

jethrothe2nd

Fair play to you Rojo, that is totally cool. Looks like some trip!

mr spuckler

Yeah that's class! I'm on the lookout for a folding bike myself for short handy trips so one of these might be the business, especially at the price

brocbrocach

mr spuckler wrote: »

Yeah that's class! I'm on the lookout for a folding bike myself for short handy trips so one of these might be the business, especially at the price

Note of caution on the decathlon folding bikes though. A couple I know who bought one each had to dump the two of them inside two months.The ones I'm talking about look very like the one in the video anyway, maybe they were a bit different, hard to tell with folding bikes. Anyway the ones in question did fine for a period and then very quickly started falling asunder. They're madly cheap but pretty heavy and the components and assembly are really bad.

mr spuckler

brocbrocach wrote: »

Note of caution on the decathlon folding bikes though. A couple I know who bought one each had to dump the two of them inside two months.The ones I'm talking about look very like the one in the video anyway, maybe they were a bit different, hard to tell with folding bikes. Anyway the ones in question did fine for a period and then very quickly started falling asunder. They're madly cheap but pretty heavy and the components and assembly are really bad.

It seems like there's 3 levels of them, £150, £180 & £270 so would be interesting to know which one it was, I'd be less surprised at the £150 being a heap of junk but would expect the £270 to do a reasonable job.

I've bought loads of Decathlon stuff in the past and have seen that effect where you generally get what you pay for, ie their really cheap stuff (in my experience) is crap whereby their more expensive own brand stuff tends to be quite good.

brocbrocach

These were bought on the Continent so maybe a bit different but they were around €150 on sale so probably the cheapest or intermediate level allright. It seemed too good to be true at the start and, as you say, they got what they paid for.

Nekarsulm

I bought a "Hoptown 320", ( donedeal, in Leitrim) which has a 6 speed derallier.
The cheapest ones are single speed.
You cannot adjust the height of the handlebar stem, but otherwise it'll do fine for short hops around town etc.
Cycling across Germany would never have occurred to me!