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What does that mean?  For the last two Summers I’ve flown to Europe with my GIANT Road bike boxed up in the hold and just a small amount of luggage.  After assembling my bike and putting most (almost all) of the small amount of luggage in the bike box to leave behind I’ve set off.  In 2017 Paris to Porto, and last Summer Lisbon to Faro and back.

I have a tubular shaped bag than hangs off the rear my saddle about the size of three baguettes strung together.  I have a camelback water backpack which I use without the bladder.  The camelback holds one tee shirt, one light sweatpants, one flip flops, a long sleeve bike jacket, leg and sleeve warmers, and a scrunchy ball of a rain jacket.

The baguette shaped bag holds one spare tube, a few bike tools, minimal toilet kit, and chargers/cords/battery pack for 2 iPhones and a ziplock with passport, credit cards and some cash. I wear the rest.  Bike shorts and shirt, cap, helmet, sunglasses, bike shoes and the rear shirt pocket has a small pump and patch kit.  Those rear pockets also hold a banana and nuts and dried fruit for the day.

This may sound like a lot, but it is minimal.  Every night I wash/rinse the shorts and shirt and they are pretty dry when I get up.  About a week after I left Paris I was biking through a small surf town south of Bordeaux and saw a cool tee shirt.  I bought it and left the old one in my B&B. In Biaritz I found a GIANT store and bought white sleeve sun protectors.  It was getting hot and I was entering Spain in late June.  No need to charbroil my forearms.

So that is the Lean from the title.  Solo means going alone or unaccompanied by support. So no non biking spouse or friend driving a support car.  I’ve done it just me the last two summers but this year have a potential riding partner.

Stage means point to point to point, like a stage race. Like a Tour race. Think Tour de France.

Finally Road Biking means using a racing road bike, rather that a touring bike.  So the point is that with minimal baggage and a frame and components configured for racing you can go fast and long every day.

Biking through the countryside of Europe I invariably meet up during the day, usually in the am and almost always on weekends with packs of local amateur riders on a fast 30 km/h ride which I can tag onto.

Having done this type of biking in Europe several times now the number one difficulty is not what you may expect which is settling into being seated on a super small and super hard saddle for 6-7 hours per day every day.  Rather it is navigating.  Yes, navigation, getting to where you are headed even in this age of google maps and 4G blanketing almost every hamlet in Europe.  I bring two iPhones to help with this task.  One is my travel iPhone with a local SIM.  The other is my X which I connect on WIFI and during the day with my hotspot.  I cache google maps and  Bikemap for the days journey.  I break up my destination with a couple way points, towns along the way.  On many days I do not know where I will stay that night.  It will depend on how long I want to go and where looks nice to stay.  Sometimes I have a destination I want to hit that is several days away, such as Bilbao where I absolutely wanted to see the Guggenheim.  And then Santioago de Compostela where I was triangulating into to meet with my friend Rabbit on foot on the’ camino’.

What makes navigation hard is that the google maps ‘bike’ option often leads to dirt roads, and in one case onto the back holes of a golf course.  On a road bike with skinny tires that means one thing…you need to turn around.  The other difficulty is that on a small screen when you zoom out you lose most of the smaller roads, and then when you zoom in you don’t know where to go as your way point or destination is nowhere to be found.  Googlew maps also does not have a ‘bike’ option in Portugal  I emailed google and got no reply.  It must be an insurance issue.

Bikemap is better, but also does not always distinguish tar from gravel and does not cache.

The other problem is that to save battery life I turn off navigation and so have to check the screen frequently.  On long stretches this is not a problem, but navigating cities and outskirts it is a major problem as sometimes you need to turn at almost every intersection.

A couple days out of Paris I decided to also use the old fashioned method of looking at signs.  France and Spain are great with signs and as long as you have the names of the next 3-4 towns along your chosen route you can navigate without google.  Some riders I met actually had a map folded tot he days ride and tucked into a handlebar case for easy viewing while riding.

Lean also means keeping up a steady pace and while I see a lot of terrain, and feel it and smell it and taste it (unlike a car road trip) I don’t stop to sightsee.  I can’t leave my bike anywhere and even if I had a cable lock I still would not want to separate it from me to enter a castle, or take a dip in a lake, or wander some quaint streets in a hillside village.  All that can be done later.

If a hotel or B&B does not want my bike in my room I move on.  This has never happened but I have had to explain just how close a bond I have with my GIANT and how I absolutely need to sleep with it.  A romantic appeal works with even the most hardened innkeeper.

The goal for Summer 2019 is Paris to Chamonix.  About 600 kms, so I figure 4 nights and 5 days.  The second to last day will be entering the Haute Jura mountains and Park before a super long descent into Geneva.  Then a lot more up and down to the Chamonix valley nestled below Mt. Blanc.