Originally Posted by
kevmcd
I'm not too worried about having the perfect bike. I will only be riding a few miles fully loaded from the airport to the hotel and then a few times switching hotel or to apartment. ...
Only one of my foreign trips involved a taxi, in that case there were two of us to split the taxi fair.
My other foreign trips involved a shuttle bus to and from the airport to near a hostel or hotel I was to stay at. Shuttle buses are quite affordable.
My last foreign trip, my luggage is in the photo, two panniers were my carry on and my personal item on the plane. The black case is the S&S bike case and has backpack straps. The orange bag is a backpack. I had camping gear (tent, sleeping gear, cooking gear) so I probably had at least twice as much luggage as you will have. The most difficulty was that I had to walk two trips between a hostel and the train station to carry it all, could not carry both backpacks at the same time.
I did not attempt to bike out of the airport on any occasions, but some people do that regularly. If that works for you, great.
If you do not have a luggage scale, you might find it useful to have. One trip with accidental overweight bag will more than cover the cost of the scale.
I met the gal in the photo below in Iceland. Her and her boyfriend bought folding bikes and had them delivered to the campground in Reykjavik. Their initial plan was to backpack in Iceland but when they arrived there they realized that was impractical so their Plan B was to buy folding bikes and strap their backpacks on them.
I have no clue how this worked out for them. Her first attempt, the pack started to fall off the rack before she got 100 feet. I was in the process of leaving, so I gave her a strap that I did not need anymore, maybe that was enough?
I really hope that they survived that trip, but they really seemed to be clueless about what they were doing. This is not the way I would go bike touring in a foreign country.