Great rides: Traffic-free cycle touring

“Keep right!” I shout to my nine-year-old daughter cycling up ahead. “I am right!”, she insists. “Your other right!” I yell. She and her bike veer over to the right of the cycle path as we encounter a group of extremely athletic-looking people roller-skiing uphill towards us.

The path we’re cycling on is part of the Drauradweg (Drau Cycle Path). Like the river it’s named after, it starts in the Italian Dolomites near the border with Austria, crosses the border to run through southern Austria, then eventually heads into Slovenia and ends in northern Croatia.

We – my husband and I, and our kids aged nine and 11 – are cycling a 100-mile section of this route, starting near the River Drau’s source in Toblach, Italy (Dobbiaco in Italian), and ending in Villach, Austria’s most southern city.

On the way, we’re picking up my parents, aged 74 and 75, ditching the bikes in a hotel’s bike storage room for a few days for a detour to do a three-day Alpine hut-to-hut hike. And we’ll be adding in plenty of rest time for lake swimming, castle visiting, high-ropes courses, roller coasters and good food and drink.

Family planning

We have planned our tour so that we’re riding only 20-35km per day. This means that the kids don’t complain at all about the riding (in fact they usually want more), and that we have lots of time to enjoy all the other entertainments that the mountains in Austria have to offer.

We are surrounded by majestic mountains on this bike tour, although you wouldn’t know it from the riding because the bike path takes us gently downhill as we follow the river on its winding course along the valley floor.

This makes riding this route with kids, or even with babies or toddlers in a bike seat or a trailer, very achievable. The other thing that makes this cycle route so accessible for families is that the vast majority of the route is segregated from traffic, and the bits that do have traffic are extremely sparsely used.

There is usually a bigger road on the other side of the valley that all the through-traffic uses, so the roads the cycle route takes are only used for access (and by bike riders!). As a result, there are few motor vehicles, and most are slow moving and accustomed to cyclists.

These small roads link tiny Austrian villages, full of wooden farmhouses with geraniums on every balcony, old barns and the occasional gasthaus (a traditional bar/restaurant).

We rent bikes in Toblach and plan to drop them off at the end of our journey. Italian company Papin Sports offers this service, and also has various shops and affiliated drop-off points all along the route, so you can be really flexible with where you start and end.

The bikes are fine for our use – fairly standard trekking bikes for the adults and 24in-wheel mountain bikes for the kids. We’re able to rent bike locks and panniers, too. We have our own helmets, although you could rent these as well.

Unfortunately (for us adults) the kids’ bikes are not equipped with pannier racks, so we have to carry the luggage for all four of us on two adult bikes. We knew this in advance, so had spent many hours planning what we needed and making sure we packed light. In reality you don’t need much, as long as you don’t mind doing a bit of hand-washing every now and then.

We have brought a few extra dry-bags and straps, so we add a handlebar bag to each of our bikes and also manage to strap a drybag to the top of each pannier rack. The panniers hold about 40 litres per pair so, with the extra bags we’ve brought, we have plenty of space for everyone’s stuff.

Downhill all the way

The first section of the cycle path, from Toblach to Lienz, is incredibly scenic. It sets the tone for the entire route, with the granite-topped Dolomites towering over us as we ride next to the small train line and the River Drau, and between meadows of wildflowers.

The path at this point is well used by pedestrians and cyclists (the vast majority on e-bikes), as well as roller-skiers clearly training for the winter.

Aside from getting used to riding on the right (and plenty of left/right confusion from the children) it’s a lovely ride. It’s always fun to cycle over a border between two countries, even if the border crossing is less exciting than the kids were hoping for.

We stop in the Austrian town of Sillian along the route to enjoy an adventure playground and high-ropes course, and then continue the ride to Lienz. We freewheel most of this section, dropping almost 600 metres in elevation by the time we reach Austria’s ‘Sunshine City’. Ironically it’s raining.

Here we meet my mum and dad, who arrive on the train in the middle of a very impressive thunderstorm. We leave our bikes to undertake a three-day, two-night hut-to-hut hike in the Gaital Alps.

On our return, and after an exciting ride on “one of the longest and most spectacular roller coasters of the Alps”, my parents pick up their bikes from the well-organised Lienz outpost of Papin Sports, and we continue our Drauradweg journey.

The route is really well signposted. It is very rare that I need to get the map or my guidebook out to check where we’re going, and it is cleverly developed to take us over or under busy roads by bridge or tunnel so we don’t ever have to encounter heavy traffic.

The River Drau increases in size next to us as we ride – there has been a lot of rain this year so it’s flowing fast – and it’s our constant companion on the route, along with the single train line. This also means there’s a get-out clause for any member of the party who doesn’t want to cycle one day: they can always take the train for a section if they fancy it.

Real, rural Austria

We overnight at a selection of different hostelries – some hotels, a very random B&B, classic Austrian guesthouses, a farm, a youth hostel. No one is surprised by our arrival by bike, and each place has a secure place to leave our bikes undercover. For the four of us, we are almost always able to find a family room with four beds, though we had booked these in advance.

Our hosts are local Austrian people, many of whom speak excellent English. We get a real insight into how people live in this valley: we see their farming methods, stumble on their village celebrations, and hear about how they make a living.

As we ride through the Drau valley, the cycle path is mostly surfaced with tarmac, with occasional stretches of hard-packed gravel. We ride by pastures full of cows with their cow bells, by fields of wildflowers and corn crops and through small villages, each with a striking, traditional church.

Although we’ve left the Dolomites behind, we’ve had a succession of Alpine ranges take their place, with an ever-changing impressive skyline. There are occasional inclines to ride up but none lasts for long.

The weather warms up and we find ourselves detouring off the route most days to find an outdoor swimming location. Austria does a great line in outdoor pools and swimming lakes with grassy surroundings and a little café. These provide a handy place to cool off, eat our packed lunch and buy a drink before heading onwards.

After 165km of cycling, we reach our final destination of Villach, which has a distinctly Mediterranean feel. The weather is truly hot, and the River Drau is wide, turquoise and magnificent in the sun as we cross over it on a foot- and bike-bridge to reach our youth hostel.

We admire the beautiful pedestrian- and bike-friendly old town as we ride through it on the way to drop off our hire bikes, which we part from reluctantly.

We have left the last 342 kilometres of the hugely tempting Drau Cycle Path unridden. To paraphrase Austria’s most famous ex-pat: we’ll be back!