The bikes

Choosing a bike for one afternoon and choosing one for a week are different problems. Over an afternoon almost anything works. Over a week, the things that decide whether you enjoy it are unglamorous: whether the frame takes a rack, how low the bottom gear goes when you’re loaded, how much total weight the frame is rated for, and whether the brakes still feel the same on day five.

So this page leads with those, not with the paint. Where a bike is the wrong choice for this route we say so on the bike’s own section, which is the opposite of how a rental catalogue usually reads.

If you only read one bike section, read this one: the Checkpoint is the bike this route was scoped around. Puglia is not a gravel destination in the marketing sense — most of the riding is on tarmac — but the tarmac is inconsistent, and the interesting connections between towns are often strade bianche, the white limestone farm tracks that cut through the olive groves. A road bike makes you avoid those. This one doesn’t.

Two practical things set it apart from the Domane, and both matter more the longer you ride. It has rack and mudguard mounts on frame and fork, so it can actually carry luggage. And it has hydraulic disc brakes rather than mechanical ones, which on a loaded bike descending off the Murgia escarpment towards the coast is a difference you feel in your hands by the bottom.

The gearing is also lower than the Domane’s: a 46/30 chainset against a 11-34 cassette. That bottom gear of 30 front, 34 rear is what gets a loaded bike up out of a coastal town without standing on the pedals.

An endurance road bike with a relaxed geometry — the kind you can stay on for six hours without your neck filing a complaint. On the long flat coastal sections between Monopoli and Brindisi, where the surface is good and the only thing slowing you down is the wind, it is the quicker and more pleasant bike by some margin.

Then the limitations, which are real and worth being blunt about. There are no rack mounts on frame or fork, so there is no way to fit panniers: whatever you carry has to go on your back or in the frame bag. The brakes are mechanical disc, not hydraulic — fine, but they need more hand force and they are the component most likely to want adjusting mid-week. And the gearing is a 50/34 chainset with an 11-32 cassette, which is a road bike’s spread: a bottom gear of 34 front, 32 rear is fine unloaded on Puglia’s gradients, and noticeably less fine with a full bag.

Pick it if you are travelling light, sending your luggage ahead yourself, or riding a subset of the flatter stages. Don’t pick it because it looks fastest.

A light pedal-assist bike at around 17 kg, which by e-bike standards is genuinely light — you can lift it onto a train or up a flight of steps without a plan. Rear hub motor, 250 W, with a torque sensor in the bottom bracket rather than a cadence sensor, so the assistance comes in proportionally to how hard you push instead of switching on and off.

The thing to understand before booking it: the first battery is built into the down tube and does not come off the bike. On a route where you sleep in a different town most nights, that means the bike has to be somewhere with a socket every evening — a garage, a courtyard, a room you can wheel it into. Small Puglian hotels are usually fine with this if you ask when booking; they are much less fine with being asked at 9pm. The second battery, at +€10 a day, is removable and solves the problem by going upstairs with you.

Range: 50 km on the built-in battery, or roughly 100 km with the second one fitted. That is our own figure from running these bikes, not a manufacturer claim — Trek doesn’t publish a range for this model at all. Treat it as a working number rather than a promise: assisted range depends on rider weight, luggage and assistance level, and on this route the variable that moves it most is the wind. A day into a northerly will cost you more battery than the same distance with it behind you.

The heavier, more forgiving option, and the one with the logistics problem solved: its battery comes off. If you want assistance and you don’t want to think about where the bike sleeps, this is the simpler answer, and it costs half the Trek’s supplement.

It also goes further on one charge than the Trek: 70 km in Eco against 50. On a route where the stages are long and the towns are far apart, that is not a small difference. One battery, though — there is no second-battery option on this bike as there is on the Trek, so 70 km is the day’s ceiling unless you can charge somewhere at lunch.

The trade is weight and rolling resistance. It is suspended and heavier than the Trek, and on 60 flat kilometres into a headwind — which is what stage 3 becomes in April — that is felt in the legs. It suits the inland stages and the rougher surfaces better than the fast coastal ones.

Two things it is not built for, stated plainly because the spec sheet says so: sustained gradients above about 10%, and continuous climbs beyond roughly 500 m of ascent. Neither is a limitation on this route, which is flat to rolling throughout — but if you are planning to take it up into the Murgia on your own, that is the boundary.

We have three, and that is the whole stock. One high frame in S/M, and two step-through, one S/M and one L/XL. For a group of four wanting all-electric, the fourth bike is a Trek, not a fourth Rockrider. We confirm the specific bike when you book rather than promising a model we might not have free that week.

No manufacturer photographs here, because we have none showing this bike as it is in our fleet, and a stock image of a different build helps nobody.

The same idea as the Checkpoint — a gravel bike for a route that mixes tarmac with white farm roads — in the one size the Trek doesn’t come in. It exists for riders who are too short for anything else in the fleet, which is a real gap on most rental lists rather than a marketing line.

Two honest differences from the Checkpoint. It is not tubeless: a puncture means changing the tube rather than letting sealant deal with it, and on the white roads that is a slightly higher chance of stopping. The repair kit and spare tube on every hire cover it. And it comes in XS only — if you fit an XS this is your gravel bike, and if you don’t, it isn’t an option.

On both gravel bikes we can fit a lower saddle, which extends the usable range further down than the frame size alone suggests. If you have struggled to find a rental bike small enough before, send your height when you write and we will tell you honestly whether this works for you.