My wife is into biking; she biked across the U.S., in one-to-two-states per year fashion over the last few years.

I'm a lot less so. I feel safer on my feet. Biking along highways with trucks and the (happily infrequent) crazy or nasty driver seems to me a LOT more dangerous than bears or snakes or avalanches or whatever on backpacking trips.

But there are places you can vacation with a bike that offer little to no traffic, plus scenery and interesting places to see. It's something my wife and I can do together, so this year we're going to bike the germanic-speaking part of the Eurovelo 6 along the Danube. Not booking a tour, just going to wing it (I'm not fluent in German, but I can do basic conversation, and so many German speakers speak very good English these days).

We've decided to get folding bikes to do this, as the cost of renting seemed pretty high, and shipping full-sized bikes seemed to be expensive and a PITA. 16" wheel size felt too small to us, so we're going with 20" wheel sizes. Specifically, we'll be trying out a bike from a company named Origami. They make a hard-shelled case for it that doesn't require oversized (or overweight) charges when checking baggage with airlines, so we're getting the bike it was designed to fit.

It's a fairly low-end bike, but has a decent aluminum frame. So we might later decide to upgrade a component or two. If we really love this we can always sell these bikes later and pay up for better ones.

We're also analyzing to find the right bike "luggage" (panniers, front/rear bag, that sort of thing) that are just the minimal we need, and that are easy to tote off the bike as well as on it.

Looking forward to all of this, and if folks with experience at this stuff have any advice that comes to mind, ... then thanks in advance for that!
_________________________
Brian Lewis
http://postholer.com/brianle