EPISODE 14
Plan Your Own Damn Route! (In Approximately Seven Steps)
Mimi Ji, a self-described map nerd and passionate cyclist, has turned her love for detailed route planning into a unique seven-step process. In this episode, Mimi shares numerous planning tips and tricks gathered from her experiences during outings with the New York City Adventure Cycling Club as well as tours in South Dakota, Quebec, and Slovenia. The conversation playfully dissects the seven steps, as Mimi compares different apps, describes how to stitch together weeklong itineraries, and encourages listeners to consider multi-sport touring. Along the way, we inevitably take several detours, with diversions into topics such as Bolivia’s Death Road, bikepacking culture in the United States, and much more.
Episode Transcript
Mimi: We’ve been talking about all these detailed steps for people that love maps and enjoy organizing and enjoy doing logistics. That’s part of the fun for me. If you don’t like to do that, you absolutely don’t need to do that.
Gabriel: You just heard Mimi Ji, describing her love for detailed route planning and her acknowledgement that it’s not for everyone. Having toured in South Dakota, Quebec, Slovenia and beyond over the past years, Mimi has developed an approximately seven-step route planning process. On today’s show, we carefully, and not so seriously, analyze each of the seven, eight, or nine steps, depending on how you’re counting. Along the way, we inevitably take several detours, exploring the Death Road in Bolivia, bikepacking culture in the United States, multi-sport touring, and much more.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello, cycle touring enthusiasts. Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. Today’s guest, Mimi Ji, learned about the show through our very first guest, Michelle Savacool. Both Mimi and Michelle are active members of the New York City Adventure Cycling Club. Mimi describes herself as a map nerd who first learned to ride a bicycle when she was 27 years old. She has turned her newfound passion for cycling and her long-standing love of geography into an amazing route-planning process that includes tips and tricks that even the most spontaneous travelers will hopefully find useful. Mimi, thank you so much for being a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist.
Mimi: Thanks for having me, Gabriel. So happy to be here.
Gabriel: Well, it’s nice to meet you and it’s very fun that you are here thanks to Michelle. Before we even get started, can you just tell me a little bit more about your relationship with Michelle?
Mimi: Oh, gosh. I don’t even remember when I met Michelle, because I joined an outdoors bike group during the pandemic, and we do a lot of trips. And for some reason, I keep placing all my friends on every single trip. So there’s this one infamous trip where, like, we did a weekend ride and it was, like, our first all-girls trip and I’m pretty sure Michelle was there. Actually, I’m 100 percent sure Michelle was there because she almost got floated down a river, and someone had to rescue her.
Gabriel: That’s memorable.
Mimi: Yeah, but I think that was the first trip where I met Michelle. She’s a ride leader for a really big bike group in New York. She was recommended to our group by another bike friend. So bikes, basically. I know her through bikes.
Gabriel: You know her through bikes and you’ve known her for a couple of years.
Mimi: Yeah, maybe four years now.
Gabriel: Okay. You say you’re a map nerd. Let’s just get started off with that. Why are you a map nerd?
Mimi: I was 8th grade geography bee champion in the state of California, I won top 50 in state. I had…
Gabriel: Sorry, I’ve heard of the spelling bee, and in the spelling bee you have to spell out ridiculously difficult words.
Mimi: Yes.
Gabriel: The geography bee is just answering questions about geography?
Mimi: Yes, it’s the same thing. It’s got a lot of little nerdy children and then you go up and you get a question about geography or map-reading and then you answer it, because as a child I had very few friends. That is what I did for fun.
Gabriel: So if I were to say to you, “What’s the capital of Bolivia?” What would you say?
Mimi: La Paz. I’m rusty! Isn’t that right? It’s been a long time.
Gabriel: It’s a trick question. I think Bolivia has two capitals.
Mimi: Oh, and Sucre!
Gabriel: Very good.
Mimi: It’s all coming back to me now.
Gabriel: I’m so rough on the guests, you know. I hit them with trick questions all the time. I put them on the spot.
Mimi: I have been to both places. I had terrible altitude sickness. I barfed my way through Bolivia.
Gabriel: That could have been an alternate name for this episode: “Barf Your Way Through Bolivia.”
Mimi: I could barely walk. There was no bicycles involved. I was in the back of a van the whole time.
Gabriel: Okay, then it’s not so good of an episode title. La Paz is the highest altitude capital, right? I mean, it’s way up there.
Mimi: Yeah, don’t fly directly in there, straight from sea level. It’s bad news.
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s a good tip.
Mimi: I did do the Death Road.
Gabriel: Oh, the Death Road.
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: You did it by bicycle.
Mimi: It’s like a tour. There’s an old road that trucks used to go on. It used to be a dirt road. Well, it’s still a dirt road. They made a highway around it now, and trucks would just fall off the edge.
Gabriel: Yeah, I heard about the Death Road in Bolivia, but I didn’t actually know who was dying on the Death Road. So, truckers are dying, because their trucks fall off?
Mimi: They built a new highway around it so people don’t use it anymore, but in the old days, trucks, buses, like public buses, would take this sketchy road. And sometimes there’s not enough passing for two cars, so sometimes a car would fall off a cliff, down into the Amazon jungle, but now it’s tourists mountain biking down this road.
Gabriel: Okay, so it’s closed to motorized traffic now?
Mimi: It’s not closed. So, once in a while, we’d see a car, but yeah, there’s no public buses anymore.
Gabriel: That’s good because, you know, it doesn’t sound encouraging if you board a public bus and it’ll take you through the Death Road. Okay, well, good. That’s an extra little side trip to Bolivia, which was cool. But now let’s get back to the geography and your map interest. So far, you’ve painted a picture of yourself as someone who was interested in maps and geography facts, which I have to say, I am too.
Mimi: Oh yeah?
Gabriel: Yeah, that’s why I came up with this crazy trick question about the capital, because as a kid, I would look over maps and I would dream about places to go.
Mimi: Yeah, exactly.
Gabriel: It was a lot of fun, and I actually took it one step further, which is I became very interested in airline travel. Back in the old days, there used to be this thing called the OAG, the Official Airline Guide, and it was a book that was very, very thick, and it had every flight of every airline.
Mimi: I would have been so into that if I knew about it.
Gabriel: Yeah. This OAG, you would just look and you’d go, okay, you can go from here to here on that airline and they always showed the three-letter airport codes.
Mimi: Did you try to memorize all of those at one point?
Gabriel: Oh yeah, I did. This is one of those trivia facts that friends know about me and they would say, “YYZ!”
Mimi: Montreal or Toronto.
Gabriel: Toronto. Every Canadian airport starts with a Y, the letter Y.
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: So I had fun with that. So I think we have a bit of a similar interest in it. Then how did that, for you, evolve into route planning?
Mimi: I was a very nerdy, unathletic child from a very nerdy, unathletic family. So we didn’t do, like, any sports. We just read books a lot, yeah.
Gabriel: And keep in mind that on this podcast, if you’ve listened to previous episodes, nerdy is seen as a very positive attribute.
Mimi: That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s why I love it. I didn’t ride a bike as a kid. I got a bike, they took the training wheels off, and I immediately flew off the bike, landed on my face, chipped a tooth, and I didn’t touch a bike again. I tried once. I crashed into a parked car. Didn’t ride a bike again until I was 27. Yeah, I learned how to ride in New York. I did hiking before then, when I get a hobby, I get very obsessive about it. So when I started riding a bike, there’s like a shop in New York called 718, and it’s wonderful. It’s run by this guy, Joe, and he basically takes beginners on mini-trips, on weekend trips, and teaches people how to get a rack, put panniers on your bike, because it’s not big here, right? When I did my Slovenia tour, my mind was blown at the number of bike touring people in Europe. I was, like, waving at everybody that came by and then on the third day I was like, “Okay, there’s too many.” To have this shop that teaches people that this is something that’s totally safe and cool to do is awesome. I went on a couple of his trips and then the pandemic happened and everything shut down, and I had a friend from that group that had signed up for the South Dakota trip that Joe was running. But obviously, because of COVID, the trip got canceled and he was like, “Oh, I just don’t know what to do. I have this plane ticket and I can’t go on this trip. Maybe I should go alone.” I was like, “I’ll go with you and I’ll make the whole route.”
Gabriel: Oh. Nice.
Mimi: So we took Joe’s little sketch on a piece of paper on where he was planning to go. I took that and I already had my trusty mapping up and I just planned our entire route. Went into it and zoomed in into the map and found all these campsites and found an amazing rail-trail and we went through national parks, planned out a whole five-day thing.
Gabriel: You had made the route and you then carried out the trip with this one friend who you’d met through Joe.
Mimi: Yeah, exactly.
Gabriel: What are the top three attractions in South Dakota? Mount Rushmore is one.
Mimi: Mount Rushmore is pretty lame. We did go.
Gabriel: Pretty lame? Mount Rushmore?
Mimi: They took a beautiful mountain and the carved things on it. Okay. It’s very Americana. We did go, just to see it. For cyclists, there’s the Mickelson Trail. So that’s like about 100 miles, I want to say, of a rail-trail. Loaded, I think we did a couple of days, and then we went through Wind Cave National Park. Beautiful gravel for, like, miles and miles with buffalo and then we came up through Custer State Park. Lots of buffalo there too. Yeah, there’s a lot of nature and wildlife, things outside of Mount Rushmore.
Gabriel: What challenges did you face in South Dakota?
Mimi: The winds never let up, right? The second worst winds I’ve experienced on a bike, second to Patagonia. So that’s how bad it was. It builds character. Your tent blows over and just no one is out there, and you’re just alone in the desert with these crazy rock formations and this big sky.
Gabriel: In a previous episode, “Get Out of Your Comfort Zone” with Christopher Briscoe, he catches a tailwind in one of the Dakotas and he manages to ride 193 miles in a day.
Mimi: That’s amazing. And the thing’s, like, you never notice the tailwind. You just think you’re having a really good day.
Gabriel: Right. It does remind me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, if you are familiar with that book. I do believe he rides his motorcycle through the Black Hills and he has kind of an epiphany.
Mimi: Yeah, I felt like I did too.
Gabriel: Oh, what was your epiphany?
Mimi: When the pandemic happened, it’s that epiphany of, “I can totally do these things by myself.” And in fact, the friend that I went on, we got totally sick of each other on Day Three of this trip. So I ended up making him a route into the Badlands.
Gabriel: What?
Mimi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s a really strong cyclist, but not a great route planner. And he kept saying, like, “I’ve never seen the Badlands before.” And I have. I drove through. So I was like, “Man, you got to go see them.” And this point we were really getting sick of each other. So I was just like, “I’m going to make you a route. Here you go. I will meet you back.”
Gabriel: Oh, that’s incredible.
Mimi: Yeah. So I did the last couple of days of the trip by myself. That was part of the epiphany of, “I don’t need an organized tour for this. I can make my own route. I know how to read a map. I can camp by myself. I can ride a bike by myself.” When you discover that you can be totally self-sufficient, it’s just such a good feeling.
Gabriel: Yeah, it’s empowering.
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: I’m still just trying to picture this scene. You have your iPhone. It says go straight. He’s got his iPhone. It says turn right.
Mimi: Yeah. We’re like, “bye.”
Gabriel: But you didn’t even meet up at the end of the day.
Mimi: No, no. I didn’t even see him until we were back in New York.
Gabriel: That’s crazy.
Mimi: It’s a good trip when there’s some level of adventure and comedy and things that happen, right?
Gabriel: And then you decided that you could plan other tours.
Mimi: Yeah. I was very much a beginner then.
Gabriel: Did you say, “My next trip will be solo,” or how did you proceed, based on your experience in South Dakota?
Mimi: I think the next trip I went on was Slovenia. /2020 was definitely a year of discovery of myself. Like many people during the pandemic, I started biking a lot more. So that year was just this whole discovery of, “I have nobody I need to make happy other than myself. What do I want to do? I want to ride my bike everywhere.” Then I planned a solo tour around Slovenia for six days. Slovenia is to this day my favorite country. I am trying to figure out how to retire there or… it’s the most magical place.
Gabriel: Yeah, it’s pretty nice.
Mimi: Everyone there is outdoorsy. The bike lanes are glorious compared to what I’m used to do. Bike highways for miles.
Gabriel: It seems like you synthesized your experiences into a seven-step program, like some kind of rehab or something like that. So let’s go over the seven steps to route planning. What is Step One of the planning process?
Mimi: I think I gave you a Step Zero too, right? So I think Step Zero was to download a bunch of apps and resources. So did you want to go over those first?
Gabriel: Yeah. It’s a seven-step program with a Step Zero.
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: You could argue it’s actually an eight-step program?
Mimi: Yeah, it could be. But a Step Zero is like a preparation step.
Gabriel: Okay, here we go. What’s the preparation step?
Mimi: So you want to download all your apps, you want to download all your mapping resources. I like Ride with GPS. That’s the main app that I use, which is a cycling-specific mapping app. Some other apps you can use are Komoot and Strava. It kind of depends by the region. All the maps are, you know, they’re based on different types of layers and a lot of crowdsourced material. So you might find, like, one app is better than the other, depending on what region you’re traveling to.
Gabriel: Also, Strava seems more geared towards competition, maybe, with personal records for segments and leaderboards and so forth.
Mimi: I think Ride with GPS started out as a mapping app, Strava started out as a competition app. They have added to their premium service, like, a routing app and they’re trying to play in that space now. But I think not a lot of people use them yet.
Gabriel: Okay, good to know. And definitely, from a geography point of view, Komoot – being a German company – has excellent coverage in Europe, whereas Ride with GPS probably is stronger in the United States.
Mimi: Right. I also have Bikemap, which when I go to Europe, I always have that downloaded. You can route in that, but I don’t want to pay for, like, six different apps. The thing I like about that app is it has all of the national cycleways. It has all of the EuroVelos, all of the bike-specific paths in Europe, really well marked. It’s terrible for the US. Do not trust it. So those are bike-specific apps and then non-cycling-specific apps, I use Gaia a lot. So that is a hiking-specific app, but it’s great with topo and it’s great with different types of layers. You can even download like what’s public land versus private land. It has a ton of crowdsourced campsites. So if you zoom in, it’s great for wilderness camping or finding water sources and trying to figure out if something is a hike-a-bike versus something you can ride on.
Gabriel: And the official name is Gaia GPS.
Mimi: Yeah. And then no matter, like, where you’re going, they probably have some local resources. So whether it’s a paper map from a local organization.
Gabriel: Right. So Step Zero, get all your resources in order based on type of app, geography, activity that you’re looking to do. Perfect. You’re prepared. Now Step One.
Mimi: The official Step One is just Daydream.
Gabriel: Come on! After all of that, Step One is Daydream?
Mimi: Yeah. So yeah. And I spent, I spent a lot of time doing Step One. You know, mostly at work or, you know, when I’m not on a bike tour, I go really hard into Step One. And that’s just taking out all your maps and just zooming in. You’re not on a bike tour right now, but you can imagine where you could be. I love maps, right? Other people might watch a show and I will spend a couple of hours just staring at a map, zooming into some weird location, and just trying to find, oh, what’s over here? Wow. That’s a cool campsite. Oh, wow. When I did my Quebec trip, that started because I just zoomed into this line on a map that went on for what looked like hundreds of miles. And I was like, “Wow, what’s that?” Looked into it, found a long-distance bike trail and then some other ones and just went from there.
Gabriel: It turned out to be worth it, this discovery of this line on a map. It made for a great tour in the end.
Mimi: Yeah, yeah. We did, like, a whole weeklong thing, just did a big circle of Quebec, including that long-distance trail. And then took some detours into some national parks, found some, like, bike-specific campsites. Yeah, it was great.
Gabriel: Okay, so Daydream is Step One, was there anything else on the daydreaming? It seems like there you just let your curiosity run wild and figure out an area that might be of interest.
Mimi: Yeah, like how do you decide what an area you want to go to is? Because I’m like a map person, that’s how I daydream. I like to, like, look into weird areas of maps. I think for a lot of other people, when they start ideating where they want to go on a bike tour, it might be through somebody’s blog that looks awesome. It might be through…
Gabriel: Friends’ recommendations.
Mimi: Or like maybe an established long-distance trail. Like I want to do this EuroVelo because it looks amazing or I want to do this specific route. Yeah.
Gabriel: Sure.
Mimi: So that’s Daydream. Step Two is Explore. So once you find an area, or like something you want to focus on, you know, start zooming in and exploring what’s around there and actually start building your route around it.
Gabriel: Can you give any tips on what is generally good to consider?
Mimi: Yeah, that’s a good question. Because now I know a lot of people that also make routes, and I feel like there’s different kinds of people. Some people make routes to find the best riding roads so they’re looking up where other people cycle. You know, I run with a lot of gravel people so, like, looking for gravel roads that are, like, hard and give you exercise. My heart belongs to classic touring, so I look for places I want to go. I look for wineries. I look for cheese stands. I look for tourist destinations. I look for mountains that I can hike. I pinpoint all the things that I want to go to, and then look up what are the common bike routes to get to string those places together. Maybe you want to detour a little bit from that path that somebody’s already established, to go to see things that you want to see. Maybe instead of going from point to point on an already established route, by exploring the area that you want to see, you make change your mind and decide that I want to go from this established route that links up to a different established route and do a whole loop or change my direction because I specifically want to see this castle or this mountain and that could change the whole direction of your trip.
Gabriel: Route planning, a lot of people do look for the trails and so many people like Michelle did the Carretera Austral or so many people do the Camino de Santiago.
Mimi: I do a lot of Google Maps zooming in checking the road structure, checking to make sure that somebody can ride on it.
Gabriel: Okay, so you put it in the terrain mode and actually check the surface conditions.
Mimi: You want to make sure that there’s a shoulder and you’re not going to be stuck on a highway with a bunch of cars.
Gabriel: Yeah, something to consider.
Mimi: I like to zoom in and look around at the tourist destinations that I want to do, maybe some hiking trails that I want to do, maybe there’s a vineyard or a winery.
Gabriel: Perfect.
Mimi: Step Three is just start your map. So now that you have an idea of everything that you want to see, maybe some major routes that you want to connect to each other, I pop open my mapping app. So for me, that would be Ride with GPS. This is where I spend a lot of time is, I just start drawing those routes. Some good tips in Ride with GPS. I do a lot of it on my phone, but when I’m doing a complicated trip, I have to do it on the computer. There’s some different features that the app has. I will route v1, v2, v3. The other thing is you don’t have to start from scratch. I enjoy this, so I do a lot of mapping from scratch, but there’s also great features in all of these apps where you can look up what other people have routed. Sometimes I start with that, because it’s always good to like see what other people have done.
Gabriel: That’s an excellent point. You don’t have to start from scratch. These apps have thousands and thousands of user-generated routes. And oftentimes they even say this is an easier one, this is moderate, this is difficult. This is one day. This is five days. So you can easily filter or check for what you’re looking for and you might end up just following somebody else’s established route or use it as a starting point.
Mimi: I have route ADD, so I love not doing the most popular thing. I like to do maybe a little bit of one of the most popular things, then stitch it together with another.
Gabriel: Okay. So at the end of this step, you should have a tentative route. A line on a map.
Mimi: Yup, exactly. And then I start organizing those together. So Step Four is to get organized. And in Ride with GPS, I usually like to pull everything into a route collection is what they call it.
Gabriel: Here we’re talking about some premium features, right? This is a paid version of Ride with GPS?
Mimi: This is the paid version. Yes. I do so much routing, I purchased the paid version.
Gabriel: And how much does that cost?
Mimi: I don’t know. It’s, like, on auto renew now.
Gabriel: Cost is no object.
Mimi: So I might have the entire route for a month-long trip, but then also the same options broken out into segments all in one collection. That way I can see it all together. I’ll start linking them all together. There’s a feature on the website where you can basically stitch together different routes. So I usually end up stitching together a whole week or more. So a very, very long section. And then I will kind of refine it. And then I’ll probably chop it back up again into specific days so that I know I’m not overdoing it on the elevation. I kind of like to know my miles and my elevation.
Gabriel: Right. So you’re going through the trouble of mapping. For me, one of the most amazing things that you can get out of it is just the statistics.
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: This was really unthinkable at the time of paper maps. You kind of looked and you could see, okay, it looks like there’s some elevation gain here and ooh, there’s a steep section and so forth. But it’s just incredible to say Point A to Point B and it says exactly how many kilometers, you get your profile, you get your height meters. It’s incredible.
Mimi: I was hiking a lot with paper maps. I feel like everybody should be able to read a paper map. It’s a great skill to have.
Gabriel: Definitely.
Mimi: You have to be able to eyeball something and for safety reasons, understand what you’re getting into.
Gabriel: Understand the topography of where you’re hiking and the steepness and just how things work together, with valleys and mountains.
Mimi: Just being on a pole line and being like, “Oh, okay, that grade is way too steep. I’m going to be pushing my bike.” Right? That’s nice.
Gabriel: I appreciate how magical it is to just be able to so quickly not only see initially – like we talked about grades, altitudes, distances – but also you can modify it. You can say that seems a little heavy that day. Let me… click. Oh, okay. That’s better now. That’s more in line with what I’m looking for, so I better stop at this other place instead. It’s amazing.
Mimi: Yeah. It just flows in. So Step Map is starting to pull the lines together and making one route and Step Four is Organize, which is just stitching everything together, putting them into a collection of the different options, including the full route map that you may or may not stick to, because things happen in maybe different segments, so that you better understand the stages or the miles that you’re going each day. Even though, guaranteed, I will not stick to that.
Gabriel: When you plan, are you going for a target number of feet or meters climbed or miles or kilometers? How do you figure out, “Oh, this stage is too hard?”
Mimi: I try to section it out, so it’s about 50 miles, 3,000 feet over every day. Sometimes you feel like you can do more or sometimes get distracted by a winery and then that’s half the day gone.
Gabriel: And then you might be a little bit wobbly once you get back on the saddle.
Mimi: I can ride better than I can walk.
Gabriel: During your Slovenia tour, at least, you had been successful in finding wineries, I guess, because despite having all these mountains, Slovenia also has some plains where there are wineries.
Mimi: I actually did not go to the wine region, so I stayed more in the mountainous region. The wine is amazing, four dollars a glass, right? It’s a quarter of our New York prices.
Gabriel: The reason I mention the wineries is because your Substack page is Winepacking Dot Com, so I thought, okay, this is someone who is doing bikepacking, or you said more touring maybe, but with wine. So I thought that that name, winepacking, meant no matter where you were, your top priority was the winery because that’s what the name suggested to me.
Mimi: It’s not. The tagline is, “It’s like bikepacking, but cute.” People are not so much into touring anymore here, they’re into, like, bikepacking, which is like a little bit more macho, and I do love to camp, right? So I do think I fit more into the bikepacking thing because I love to camp. My hammock is more comfortable to me than a bed, so I camp whenever I can, but there’s some elements of that culture, I guess, that come off a little bit bro-ey and masculine and trying to be hardcore. It’s okay to ride hard. It’s okay to love nature and to camp and do all these cool things, and still love a winery and still be feminine and still take pictures of your bike in a glorious meadow.
Gabriel: I had not realized that this word “bikepacking” had these other connotations. To me, it always rang more as a different bicycle setup. You know, the bicycle setup that I always used was the touring setup, and I used that because basically when I started touring, there wasn’t any other setup.
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: So you more or less had to get racks – unless you wanted a trailer or something – you had to get racks, you had to get panniers. And then bikepacking emerged as a lighter, maybe more rugged way of going. Gravel bikes came up, panniers got dropped in favor of different bags that went on the frame, and that’s how I always understood it. But you’re telling me that there’s a lot more to the culture. I mean, you’re calling it “bro culture” and “masculine culture.” So aren’t there a lot of women who are into bikepacking as well?
Mimi: Absolutely.
Gabriel: Can you just tell a little bit about what the bikepacking culture in the United States is?
Mimi: On its surface is everything you said, right? It’s just focusing less on the traditional pannier setup. It’s focusing more on off-road instead of being on a road bike. It’s focusing a little bit more on camping than, you know, staying at an Airbnb. And maybe this happens in other sports too, right? In all things where predominantly men have done it, or started doing it, or the first to do it for some reason, it can accidentally develop a bro-ey culture, right? I don’t want to be the ambassador of different cycling subcultures, but yeah, like you think about the stereotypes of gravel or bikepacking, right? It’s like, a guy with a mustache wearing flannel, some tattoos, you know?
Gabriel: I see. So basically someone who would be a barista at a Berlin coffee shop. A hipster type.
Mimi: Probably a hipster type.
Gabriel: Maybe a beard, a full beard.
Mimi: Yeah. They’re probably an ally, but they’re pretty macho and they want to go to a brewery and, right?
Gabriel: But again, so many women participate in bikepacking. How are they looking then?
Mimi: Um, I think the same.
Gabriel: The mustache and the full beard?
Mimi: Sure. Well, no. No, but I think there’s a pressure, and I’m not saying this is on purpose, but there’s a pressure that the touring setup, the panniers and the winery and the castles are not cool enough in this world. And we’re doing something different and we’re doing something, you know, that’s, like, non-traditional. And I think winepacking is about, it’s okay to do this sport and love the things that are traditionally feminine and not necessarily fitting in with this culture, because even if you’re not trying, if you’re building a culture that is coming off as masculine, you are building barriers to entry, right? You can make it accessible and still go hard.
Gabriel: Okay, interesting. And so winepacking, we know that you have this Substack page. Is there any other resource that’s Winepacking Dot Com or something?
Mimi: Winepacking Dot Com. It’s not a really serious endeavor. It’s more a place where I put my travel logs and my humor. It used to be the actual website for a wine bottle distribution company, which I thought was even more hilarious. And they went out of business.
Gabriel: And they went out of business?
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: Oh boy. But the domain name was too expensive to purchase?
Mimi: Yeah, I want to spend zero dollars.
Gabriel: If that’s your budget, then everything is too expensive.
Mimi: Yeah, it’s a place where I post my writings. I don’t think it’s a movement. I think it’s my blog.
Gabriel: Okay. Every movement has to start somewhere.
Mimi: Going back to that weird stuff that was happening in 2020 and 2021, did you guys have the “outdoors so white” movement? This might be a purely American thing, where people were – for good reason – questioning barriers to entry into the world of outdoors. Most people are allies and they want to be open to women and People of Color entering the world of outdoors. There’s still these things that people don’t think about, how it’s harder for women and non-white people to get into these activities, because we haven’t always been there and we haven’t always been welcome trying to break down these barriers – and oftentimes unintentional barriers – of more people getting into a very niche sport.
Gabriel: In the previous episode about the AIDS/LifeCycle with Meg Schutzer – that’s a charity ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles – Meg really points out that most of the participants are white gay men, and she’s really doing a lot to try to increase the accessibility of the event to People of Color and women and trans…
Mimi: So much of getting into something, especially something that’s a little bit niche is, do your friends do it? Do the people around you do it? You have to be so confident and comfortable breaking into a group of people that may not be trying to be unwelcoming, but they already have their own little group.
Gabriel: That hits it exactly on the head.
Mimi: Having learned how to ride a bike when I was 27, I remember when I was trying to upgrade from a hybrid little bike to a road bike, going from bike shop to bike shop, and always getting offered the cruiser. So all my bikes are named Lolly. I’m on to Lolly 9 now. There’s such a journey. I was on a hiking trip over ten years ago and we saw this one guy biking with his panniers and we were like, “Oh my god, that’s so hardcore.” And just the whole journey of myself being like, “Oh my god, I’m that guy now.”
Gabriel: Yeah, you’ve made it. You’re in.
Mimi: I’ve made it to happiness if I could only quit my job now.
Gabriel: Can you walk us through your upcoming summer adventure in Europe?
Mimi: Yeah. For the first time in my life, I’m getting more than an American vacation. So I have five whole weeks off and I’m so excited.
Gabriel: Woohoo.
Mimi: So I had a whole bunch of options. I had all these routes I wanted to go to the Balkans. I really wanted to do the classic over-the-Alps kind of thing. But my friend scored tickets to gold medal women’s soccer at the Olympics in Paris. Nice. I want to aim to be in Paris in August. I’m going to work remote there. And then I was thinking, where do I want to be in July in Europe? And definitely Scandinavia, because I think everywhere else is going to be too hot. So we are planning to…
Gabriel: And when you say we, who is it?
Mimi: So I planned this whole thing for myself solo. And my friend Emily quit her job and she was like, “I’m coming too!” So amazing. It’s going to be the two of us. We have done trips before. We did a Scotland trip together and we’re in the same local bike club. If you’re a good planner, your friends will be like, “You can plan anything and I will go on this trip with you and it will be like, I will do anything that you want because I don’t like planning.” And then you get there and they complain about everything, right? Emily is not that person. She is truly, like, up for anything. You should have her as your next guest. You should just interview our whole crew together.
Gabriel: So wait, Emily and Michelle and you are all on the same cycling club?
Mimi: Yeah, yeah, we’re all in the same cycling club.
Gabriel: What’s the name of this club?
Mimi: ADV. Adventure Cycling Club, New York Adventure Cycling Club.
Gabriel: A… Hold on. A-D-V?
Mimi: Right. The letters don’t actually stand for anything other than “adventure.”
Gabriel: Because I was thinking Adventure Cycling Club, that’s ACC.
Mimi: No, there’s actually already an organization that’s called that that we get confused for a lot and they do something totally different.
Gabriel: OK, so ACC was taken.
Mimi: Yeah. We did not start this club. It was a club that was started by some friends a while ago. We all joined because it’s a good New York local group of people that just love to ride bikes and go camping. And I especially love that there’s a good core group of women in the club that like to tour together.
Gabriel: What are the other points along the way?
Mimi: So we’re flying into Copenhagen. We are biking into Sweden to Gothenburg. I have it mapped out to go to Oslo, but we’ll have to probably take a train to skip that section, because we’ll run out of time. Scandinavia is surprisingly big. And then from Oslo, we will bike towards Bergen. So towards the West Coast. But we won’t hit Bergen. We’ll go over the Rallarvegen down the coast, through all the pretty fjords and then take a ferry back into Denmark.
Gabriel: Will you use the full five weeks on that ride?
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: That sounds like a great adventure for sure.
Mimi: Yeah, I’ll let you know how it goes.
Gabriel: Let’s get back to the seven-step program, though. What’s the next one?
Mimi: So Step Five is Logistics. I like to bike with my own bike at all times because I’m a short person and it is impossible for me to rent a decent bike anywhere. So one of the things that I’m always looking for in logistics is, I like to route in a circle. I don’t typically do point-to-point because I’m flying in somewhere with my bike in a bike bag and I need to go back to that same location to pick it up at the end. Have you heard this riddle where, for some reason, like, you need to cross the river and you’re in a canoe, but you have a cabbage, a rabbit and a fox?
Gabriel: I think I’ve heard different versions of it. But yes, you can’t have the fox and the rabbit in the same…
Mimi: The fox will eat the rabbit and then the rabbit will eat the cabbage, And why you are trying to cross the river and you have these three things with you, nobody explains to you.
Gabriel: Why would you have a fox, a rabbit and a cabbage in your canoe in the first place?
Mimi: Yeah, like, who are you? Where are you going? But that’s how I feel, because I’m always like, OK, all right, I’m riding. I have this bicycle, but then I have this giant bike box that I flew with and I can’t put that on the bike. I have to leave it somewhere. So those logistical challenges are always part of perfecting the trip. And sometimes the route changes based on whether I can find a hotel that will store my bike for two months, for example.
Gabriel: One technique that people sometimes use is, they will say to a hotel, “Hey, we’re going to spend this night in five weeks at your hotel. Can you keep the bike bag for us?” Is that what you’re doing in Copenhagen?
Mimi: Yup, exactly. So I emailed like five hotels and I found this one that was like, “Yes, we will let you keep your stuff here for an entire month.” Because I’m working out of Paris after the trip, right? I’m going to have my whole suitcase, I have my work clothes, I have my laptop. So that’s going to be in a hotel. Usually I try to get a hotel that will hold the bags. The other option is, a lot of bike shops are friendly. So my first thing is I usually call around for a bike shop and I’m like, “Oh, we’re going on this huge tour.” And usually they’re like, “That’s amazing. We will totally hold your bags.” That did not work in Denmark because I think cycling is so common there. No bike shop was remotely impressed with this trip. They were just like, “No, we don’t want to store your bags.”
Gabriel: “Oh, you’re biking around to Sweden and Norway. OK, good for you. This is not a bike bag hotel. Thank you.”
Mimi: Whereas in North Dakota, right, they’re like, “Oh my God, that’s awesome! No one does this.”
Gabriel: Yeah, it’s a good tip with the bicycle shop. I had not thought about that. But I have done the hotel trick and it has always worked.
Mimi: I just always default to a circle, because I forget that in some places you can get from one place to another and then just take a train back.
Gabriel: Yeah, if you haven’t shipped your bike in a cardboard box that you can throw away and then get a new one somewhere else at a bike shop, a friendly bike shop.
Mimi: That’s the other strategy is just to go with a steel bike, put in a cardboard box.
Gabriel: Yeah, so if you have a bike bag of some kind that you want to retrieve, you have to eventually make it a circle.
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: Even though it is true that you might be able to return by train, maybe more easily in Europe than in the US, you still need to get back to the bike bag.
Mimi: Yeah, exactly. We do a lot of looking at hiker shuttles. Sometimes for long-distance hikers, there’s a guy with a van that you can call up and take you from one point to the other.
Gabriel: Since you mentioned the hiker shuttle, let’s talk a little bit about the multi-sport tour. When you have your fully loaded bicycle and you decide you want to now do one, two, three days of hiking, what’s your strategy there with the bicycle?
Mimi: If I were to take my entire backpacking set up, I think that would be too much to carry. It’s enough to have to carry my hiking shoes. My knees are bad now, right? So I bring my one hiking pole in my pannier. There is a penalty in weight, right? So I have to carry my hiking boots and my hiking pole, and that’s like a whole extra thing. My bike is already, you know, very, very small. So I’m definitely running the panniers on the trip instead of the tail bag. So I usually do either an overnight or day hikes when I’m planning to be mostly on the bike. I don’t bring a lock. Well, I have a tiny one. When I did Slovenia, I rode up to a hut on a gravel road. And they let me keep the bike in a shed there. And then when we did a via ferrata tour in Quebec, we left the bikes with the via ferrata people. So yeah, usually finding some sort of friendly business that’ll hold your bike.
Gabriel: OK, but you don’t know in advance who might do that on this upcoming trip.
Mimi: Yeah, no, that’s actually… That is actually something that I’ve not figured out yet.
Gabriel: But generally you recommend this multi-sport mode. It doesn’t have that much overhead.
Mimi: I love it, yeah. Oh, another good example is this kayak trip, right? So like, OK, we found a great round all the way from Oslo to Flåm, and then you just dead end straight into a giant fjord. So we booked a kayak trip to get across it and found an organizer that will take our bikes all the way to the other end.
Gabriel: OK, but I do know from experience, you don’t have to take the kayak, because I didn’t.
Mimi: You can take only a train. There’s no road. You can take the train from Myrdal to Upsete.
Gabriel: Yeah. OK. In the end, we had to take a train through a tunnel. That’s right.
Mimi: With this trip coming up, I didn’t want to make stages. I didn’t want to plan. I didn’t book a single accommodation, but the things that I like to do or have, like, a guideline of roughly where I should be on certain dates. I have an Excel sheet with all the places I’m right, like, milestones I’m supposed to head.
Gabriel: Some people plan most of their accommodations in advance to not be disappointed. And there are others who plan zero accommodations in advance.
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: And so you’re saying you’re in the latter camp. You haven’t booked anything?
Mimi: Yeah, I prefer not to book anything. I think there are some trips in high season in a touristy place that you have to book something. There is a date where we know we want to be at the kayak tour. So you have to book some things, but I love the feeling of independence and not having a deadline. I’m stuck at work most of my life. So being on a bike tour, especially like the first one that I’m going on that’s this long, it just feels like freedom, right? And not having to book anything is the best part. But also like in Scandinavia, we can wild camp, so there’s always going to be an option.
Gabriel: Do you somehow overlay Warmshowers availability and location onto your route?
Mimi: So I have it downloaded. I have it up in my suite of things I’m looking at, but I’ve never used Warmshowers.
Gabriel: Oh, interesting. So you’re not a member.
Mimi: I am not a member in good standing. I paid the 30 dollar fee, but I have not paid my annual dues. When I’m looking at the map, it doesn’t seem to be a ton of things on the route. But I love that it exists and probably for the length of time that we’re traveling for, it might be good to just have the membership as a backup.
Gabriel: It’s quite popular all over Europe. So I would be surprised if there weren’t people on the way.
Mimi: Sometimes I like to pick a more rural route, but on this one, yeah, we’re going to be on national cycle routes.
Gabriel: Yeah, lots to see. Anyway, let’s go back to a seven-step program.
Mimi: So Step Six, Schedule. So that is when you have all your routes, all your segments. You kind of know like how much progress you’re going to make each day. Have that on a folder, right? So then I break out like a big Excel spreadsheet, very simple. Just a spreadsheet and I start mapping out the dates in one column. And then I have columns for the link to the route for each day. And then approximately some ideas for where we’ll be spending the night. So the endpoint for each day. And then I keep my, you know, logistic step in there. The link to my fairy tickets or the confirmation code to the hut that we booked or something like that. So that’s all on a spreadsheet. That’s all planned out. That brings us to Step Seven, which is prepare to throw that out the window. Because I have never been able to follow a spreadsheet. I like having a planning document because it keeps me generally organized. I know if I’m behind, I know if I’m ahead, but I’m usually off the schedule by the first week. And sometimes I’ll end up back on the schedule because I know where, like, I need to make up some time, cut some things. I have an open day in there every week. So I have one day that’s just like nothing, no activities planned. Because that way if you miss the ferry and the ferry doesn’t come until the next day, you are not behind schedule. I think it would drive me crazy if I was sticking to that schedule religiously. That takes the joy out of a bike tour. It’s nice to have guardrails and it’s nice to have a reference sheet.
Gabriel: I can think of many uses for this reference sheet and it ties back into logistics. It’s an acknowledgement that it is basically impossible to stay on the schedule. You really can’t do it. And if you could, you would sacrifice so much to do it, either by bicycling in terrible weather or into the night, to get to your destination or whatever. The sacrifices would be massive to try to stick to a schedule day to day.
Mimi: Yeah, the end of Step Seven. We’ve been talking about all these detailed steps for people that love maps and enjoy organizing and enjoy doing logistics. That’s part of the fun for me. If you don’t like to do that, you absolutely don’t need to do that. So Step Eight is if you don’t want to do Steps One through Seven, just do Step Eight, which is ride your bike and have fun.
Gabriel: Which is actually Step Nine, because there’s a Step Zero. Yeah, this is all optional, of course. And for certain kinds of people, it’s very relevant and other kinds of people will think, “I can’t relate to this at all. I just go!” And that’s OK.
Mimi: Everyone is different and everybody should ride their bike. When I post like Instagram or whatever, I do get a lot of questions. Like, “Where do you even come up with these ideas? How do you plan this route?” It’s a lot of work because I like the steps of planning.
Gabriel: It’s always a balance, right? Sometimes the spontaneity is great because you can just end up meeting someone and spending a week somewhere where you only thought you’d spend a night.
Mimi: Yeah.
Gabriel: And sometimes the planning is great because you can be prepared for, “OK, in this section, I need to do this and here I need to watch out for that.” I personally try to achieve some kind of a balance, because I can’t do the extreme planning, but I also can’t do what some people do, which is get on the bike and start going and it’s 100 percent improvised.
Mimi: I could not tour with somebody that wanted to stick to the schedule that even I planned. That would drive me up a wall.
Gabriel: You’ve mentioned that you were so late to start bicycling. What feelings are you getting from the touring or this being on a bicycle that makes you want to go for more? And it seems like every time the trip is a little bit more involved.
Mimi: Yeah, yeah, working my way up to retirement, when I can do this full time, man. Yeah, it’s freedom, right? It’s pure freedom. It’s just that feeling, the same feeling of, you know, years ago when I was in South Dakota and just being able to do something for the first time and being completely self-reliant and that feeling of doing something that you didn’t think you could do and pushing it a little bit farther every time and being able to plan your own damn route around the things that you want to do. Trying to figure out what makes you happy and just being free to do that.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on the Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find the link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife, Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
Mimi: It’s from Flåm to G- something. G- G- G-…
Gabriel: I’ve been there! No, I’m kidding.
Mimi: Oh, gosh, it’s having a conversation with somebody with ADD, right? It’ll jump all over just like my routes.