Hello! This post is a little different. Usually I write practical how-to’s about bikepacking and touring to help more people go adventuring on bikes. I’m passionate about this because cycling has been a very meaningful way of experiencing the world for me personally.
I pursue this goal in other ways too, both in real life and on the internet, and today I’m excited to announce my latest bike-obsessed project: BikeSleepBike (also affectionately known as BSB). If you enjoy multi-day bike travel of any kind, whether it’s a round-the-world bike tour or a quick bikepacking getaway, this tool is designed and built with love specifically for you.
You can check it out here:
Or, if you’re not convinced yet, keep reading…
What is BikeSleepBike?
Bike Sleep Bike is, on the most basic level, a directory of bicycle travel blogs and bikepacking blogs. People (like you!) can submit links to their bike travel blog posts / trip reports / trip journals, whatever you want to call them. And then other people can search and browse them by country, route, style of riding, and more.
My vision is that BSB becomes a place to go for inspiration and information about multiday bike rides all around the world. With nearly 100 countries and dozens of specific routes represented so far, it’s an inclusive bike travel tool with something for every type of pedal-powered adventurer.
Here’s a screenshot:
Is this for bikepacking or touring?
Both! Bike travel seems to be developing a bit of a split personality these days. The mountain biker getting into overnight trips might, at first glance, not have much in common with the round-the-world bicycle tourer. While I’m in favor of celebrating our commonalities more than our differences – isn’t it all about biking, sleeping, and biking some more? – I know many people want to follow their specific interests.
So, every journal submitted to BSB is tagged as either bikepacking or touring (or both, if you really can’t decide). Many posts are also tagged by surface, including pavement, gravel, dirt, and singletrack, so you can filter by that as well. Currently there’s a healthy representation of both touring and bikepacking-style content, which I’ve made sure of because I personally am into both! So, whether you’re looking for bikepacking blogs or bicycle touring blogs, you can easily find either.
You’ll find plenty of bikepacking content… And also plenty of touring content.
How would I use BSB?
Here’s how I envision BikeSleepBike being used:
Find new routes and places for your bucket list. The main page makes it easy to search by continent, country, and route name, so you can discover ideas for routes and places that capture your imagination. You can filter by the type of riding, style of touring or bikepacking, and even special features like food, culture, or scenery that really stood out to the person writing the trip report. Then, visit the bikepacking blogs in the results for pictures, trip writeups, and more.
Research logistical and route details as you plan a bike tour. There’s a reason we all love reading trip reports from other cyclists. They’re a valuable tool for learning about route conditions and what kinds of challenges and rewards to expect along the way. Once you’ve decided on a riding destination or a specific bike touring route, you can use BikeSleepBike to find bike touring blogs with the details you’re looking for. There’s even an option to filter for journals that include maps or videos.
Find examples of diversity in the cycling community. When bloggers add their posts to the directory, they have the option to add tags that describe themselves. So far people have added tags like person of color, solo female, middle aged, and with kids. For some of us (* raises hand as solo woman *) it’s helpful to find examples of other bike travelers who are like us in certain ways. It gives us confidence and helps us overcome fear. And it’s important for the bike travel community as a whole to recognize the diversity among us. These rider tags are intended to be a celebration of diversity and inclusivity.
Share your bike travel and bikepacking blog posts with a wider audience. If you write about your bike trips online, you probably hope to share your knowledge and experience with other cyclists. But the state of the internet these days makes it almost impossible for small sites to reach a wide audience. By adding your bike travel posts to the BSB directory, you help other cyclists find them easily.
Is this like CrazyGuyOnABike.com?
If you’ve been exploring bike touring blogs for more than about 30 seconds, you know about CGOAB. You can already find trip journals by country there, so why would you need BSB? This is the most common question I get asked when telling people about BikeSleepBike, so let me answer it here.
CGOAB is a platform that hosts bike touring journals. All the content lives there and is only available through the CGOAB website. It was started a long time ago, back when making websites was kind of hard and most people didn’t want to deal with it.
But today, everyone and their mother (literally) seems to have their own website. Thanks to WordPress, Squarespace, and the like, starting your own bike blog can be done in about 10 minutes. So high-quality content about bike routes all over the world is scattered around the internet, and thanks to the challenges of search engine optimization (trust me, SEO is a pain), most of it is very hard to find, even using Google.
Here’s where Bike Sleep Bike comes in. When website owners add their blog links to the directory, they become easy for anyone to find, even for tiny sites that Google doesn’t show in search results. And this means bike travelers and bikepackers can share and find inspiration and logistical details more easily.
I hope you’ll check it out!
If this sounds intriguing, I hope you’ll head over to BikeSleepBike.com and check it out. This is a passion project that makes no money whatsoever, and my only measure of success is how many people benefit from it. So if you think it’s cool, please consider sharing it with your bike friends, or linking to it from your own website, both of which will help it grow and become more even more helpful to more cyclists. Thanks!
Feel free to share your feedback and ideas for the project as well. I’m a one-woman show and can’t promise to implement them all, but I want to make this tool as useful as possible to the bike travel community. So, tell me what you think!
More Bike Travel Resources
Since you’re interested in bikepacking and touring, you might also find these helpful:
Or, visit the full bike travel resources page here!
About the Author
Hi there, I’m Alissa, founder of Exploring Wild. I’ve traveled over 19,000 miles by bike and still can’t stop planning my next ride (and helping you plan yours). Pavement and panniers or singletrack and seat bag, I love it all. On my bike I feel free. Learn more about me here.
Bike resources in your inbox?
There’s more where this came from! Sign up here for occasional emails full of inspiration and information about bikepacking and bicycle touring.
Share the Adventure
If you found this article helpful, please consider sharing so more people can benefit from it:
Very nice project, I have been thinking of creating a directory of all the touring interesting blogs I have found, if only for personal use. It is so sad that Google has changed their algorithm over the last decade and now interesting cycling blogs sometimes don’t show up in search results even when you are searching for the exact words you know will be in the post.
Here’s the problem though: travel blogs quickly become unreachable. If the tourer was paying for a custom domain, then it so often happens that 2-3 years after finishing their tour, they completely move on with their lives and stop paying for the custom domain, so their site disappears entirely. Another problem is that they put all their photos on some online photo repository that eventually gets deleted, so the blog text is still there, but all the photos are gone.
Consequently, an attempt to list blogs really ought to link to Wayback Machine snapshots in addition to the website’s URL.
Thanks! That’s a very good point, and I’ll add it to the project’s to-do list. I was planning to just remove dead entries periodically, but the Wayback Machine is an interesting idea.
I see you have a bike touring blog yourself! Would you like to add your posts to the directory? I think they’d be great additions.
I have finally been catching up with delayed posts of my last big tour, so sure, go ahead and add my blog to your directory.
Great! I’ve been enjoying your posts as you add them. Thanks for being part of the directory!