Planning a Bike Tour on the Empire State Trail in 2025

You already know that you want to go on an Empire State Trail Bike Tour in 2025. But there are many questions: 

• Do you know where you want to ride and how many days?
• Do you know where you want to start and end? How will you get there?
• Do you want to use your own bike or rent a bike?
• Do you know where you want to stay along your ride? Will there be services and good places to eat?
• Are you familiar with all of the places you can visit while you ride? Are there particular attractions or experiences that you are interested in? Are there particular foods or local products you would like to try?
• Would you like a reliable GPS program to help you navigate the route and provide you with information while you ride? (If you rely only on Google Maps and signs, you are going to miss a lot and end up on bad roads.)

If you are not at all familiar with New York, you should expect to spend about 30 to 50 hours planning out your tour so that you can be organized enough to satisfy the above questions.  If you have some familiarity with New York, perhaps it will take you a few hours less.  Our Tour Planning Services are intended to save you this work.

Tour Planning Services

Using our tour planning services is an up-front cost, where you have us put the logistics, accommodations, and GPS together for you. This service can be tailored to any budget. If you are looking to hold down costs, we can usually alert you to cost savings that are hard to know about without living here. Sometimes you can make back what you pay us in trip planning fees. 

Pricing:  $500 per segment (Hudson Valley, Erie Canal or Champlain Valley). 

$800 for two segments (such as Buffalo to NYC). 

There may be additional charges for more complicated tours that require extra hours of work to put together.   

Here’s what you get:

• Selecting the best itinerary. Through phone and email consultation, we can go over options with you to create an itinerary that has the ideal mileage per day for your group. This would include a selection of lodging options in locations that best suit your group.
• Getting there and away. We can give you customized options for getting to the start of your ride, and getting back from the end of your ride. This can include logistics for traveling with your own bikes, or for using rental bikes.

• Overview maps. Each day of riding will come with a set of overview maps that describe the highlights of each day, as well as the location of services. Emergency medical facilities and bike shops are identified as well as restaurants, convenience stores, and other services that cyclists may need.  Click here to see a sample overview map
• Turn-by-turn GPS navigation. Your entire ride would be programmed with GPS navigation through Ride With GPS. You can run the GPS by using a smartphone app or   by downloading it to a Garmin or other device. This GPS will route you directly to and from your accommodations each day, and will help you find restaurants, services, scenic viewpoints, historic sights and more as you ride. Click here to see a sample of the GPS mapping you would receive. 
  

  You will pass hundreds of these signs in New York. Are they all worth stopping to read? Our GPS reads you summaries while you ride and gives you pictures of each sign to read later.

• Information, attractions and points of interest. Your overview maps and GPS navigation can be customized to include information about specific attractions, recommended places to eat, good places to take breaks, notable scenic or historical sites and more. The Ride With GPS smartphone app also includes a guide with photographs of every informational panel along your route so that you do not need to stop and read any. The GPS will read you one-sentence summaries about what each sign is about as you pass the sign, so you will know if you want to read it.