Imho, if they are cold-blooded or warm-blooded horses it makes more sense for one of the horses to carry a collapsible bike - if it's absolutely central to the plot and they can't get that bike anywhere else or need it for sentimental reasons.
The gait difference re: horses + human-on-bike are such that this just becomes so much more awkward than if you have a completely inexperienced rider on an experienced horse, following behind another experienced horse/rider. (Horses are trained like this all the time, especially if they're going to be getting used to pulling carriages / traveling with other horses).
Unless the bicycle is alive and another character (which it sounds like from part 3?) in which case the bike can look after itself lol.
The reason many towns in the US and the UK tend to historically be around 20-30 miles apart is because this was a pace a horse could comfortably do in a day (if trained to it, fit, and on well-graded roads) give or take, at a low speed.
Horses can easily do 15km when trained to it, horse marathons are a thing today, where such distances are considered very reasonable with moderate training (as much for the rider as the horse). This is where the experience of the riders will matter a lot. Horses are designed to graze very large territories in herds, and while they can be stationary, they can travel for days if need be to find lush meadows/pastures/grazing.
People, on the other hand, are not really built to have their legs spread apart while being jostled up and down all day, and it can lead to pretty serious (literally agonising) joint pain. When inexperienced, riders also aren't trained to know how to post or move with the horse at different gaits, which makes things harder for the horse *and* the rider (a rider also won't know if the saddle is fitting well, how to adjust the girth if necessary, how to hold their legs/feet in a way that "talks" to the horse while their legs/feet don't fatigue (it's not immediately intuitive for many).
There are different levels to 'experienced rider.' Are these folks regularly taking all-day walking/trotting trips with their horses to go to the neighbouring town? Or are they just used to going short distances to neighbouring farms? If the latter, their muscles will fatigue faster than the horses likely will (unless the horses have never been asked to take a day trip before - many horses today, including extremely experienced horses and their riders, have never been trained to do this because marathons just aren't as common now as things like dressage / event jumping and so on. The closest we get is trail rides, which are rarely an entire day - there are experienced riders who don't know what it feels like to be on a horse that's moving all day with only very short breaks, and experienced horses that don't know what this is like too, so 'Experienced' in your definition is going to vary HUGELY. If you want to make it easy on yourself, just make them horses that have either been a) trained to regularly move visitors from the rural area to the town and vice versa and who then ended up in the care of these characters, or b) dedicated to more long-distance travel, it is reasonable to expect that towns with horses have towns specifically trained for this, including rural areas - trade is important, you need ways to do it. But be aware that many of these horses are often cold/warm-bloods (i.e. the thicker, heavyset horses built more for endurance than speed))
And yes, a horse could do a return trip, but it would need decent rest / feed first. You would not be doing this to them every day.
Many horses - including those trained for this - won't do this kind of trip at night, *especially* if there's rain (depth perception is an issue with horses so many spook at water because they don't know how deep it is, this is often worse at night even with horses that can navigate water during the day).
I don't know why the trip has to be at 2am instead of say, 4am when you could feasibly make it dawn in a place closer to the polar circles, or if there's urgency and therefore the horses can't be walking. As you can tell, there is a TON of variables to consider!! :D Additionally, what are they bringing along as feed? Grass is often not going to cut it. Foods like horsebread exist for a reason,
(Experience: Have ridden, trained in Natural Horsemanship, and have done many dedicated hours of research specifically into horses as transport for my own writing, which led me into an interest in horse marathons, which I highly recommend you look further into!)
Overall 15 kmh should be more than possible with horses used/trained to these distances already, and riders who are too. Riders not trained to those distances will fail faster than horses *and* make the horse's life difficult through not knowing how to move with a horse (they don't have to *know* the horse, but they *do* need muscle memory / control). Night is going to be a big issue esp given weather. Rural areas are not generally lit and not's not realistic to make them lit without a good worldbuilding reason, even areas that *only* used horses for transport back in the day were not lighting their streets. They were either not traveling at night OR they were often *whipping* a very well-trained horse and forcing them to do it (breaking in a horse was a very different journey compared to what we have today which led to both some truly bombproof horses, and horses that were like 'fuck off' except to very specific things and people lol). (And while it happens frequently in fiction, this was not a thing people were wasting horses on potentially otherwise, they are *worth too much.* So if you're writing a 'characters escaping in the dead of night' scene, if they care about the welfare of extremely valuable animals and you haven't given them a reason to have the horses used to travelling at night (which can be resolved with some dialogue), this is just not something someone would do to horses they cared for. It's not only something horses don't like doing, it's potentially fatally dangerous to both humans and the horses - the lack of depth perception + solid night vision is a BIG issue!!!)
no subject
The gait difference re: horses + human-on-bike are such that this just becomes so much more awkward than if you have a completely inexperienced rider on an experienced horse, following behind another experienced horse/rider. (Horses are trained like this all the time, especially if they're going to be getting used to pulling carriages / traveling with other horses).
Unless the bicycle is alive and another character (which it sounds like from part 3?) in which case the bike can look after itself lol.
The reason many towns in the US and the UK tend to historically be around 20-30 miles apart is because this was a pace a horse could comfortably do in a day (if trained to it, fit, and on well-graded roads) give or take, at a low speed.
Horses can easily do 15km when trained to it, horse marathons are a thing today, where such distances are considered very reasonable with moderate training (as much for the rider as the horse). This is where the experience of the riders will matter a lot. Horses are designed to graze very large territories in herds, and while they can be stationary, they can travel for days if need be to find lush meadows/pastures/grazing.
People, on the other hand, are not really built to have their legs spread apart while being jostled up and down all day, and it can lead to pretty serious (literally agonising) joint pain. When inexperienced, riders also aren't trained to know how to post or move with the horse at different gaits, which makes things harder for the horse *and* the rider (a rider also won't know if the saddle is fitting well, how to adjust the girth if necessary, how to hold their legs/feet in a way that "talks" to the horse while their legs/feet don't fatigue (it's not immediately intuitive for many).
There are different levels to 'experienced rider.' Are these folks regularly taking all-day walking/trotting trips with their horses to go to the neighbouring town? Or are they just used to going short distances to neighbouring farms? If the latter, their muscles will fatigue faster than the horses likely will (unless the horses have never been asked to take a day trip before - many horses today, including extremely experienced horses and their riders, have never been trained to do this because marathons just aren't as common now as things like dressage / event jumping and so on. The closest we get is trail rides, which are rarely an entire day - there are experienced riders who don't know what it feels like to be on a horse that's moving all day with only very short breaks, and experienced horses that don't know what this is like too, so 'Experienced' in your definition is going to vary HUGELY. If you want to make it easy on yourself, just make them horses that have either been a) trained to regularly move visitors from the rural area to the town and vice versa and who then ended up in the care of these characters, or b) dedicated to more long-distance travel, it is reasonable to expect that towns with horses have towns specifically trained for this, including rural areas - trade is important, you need ways to do it. But be aware that many of these horses are often cold/warm-bloods (i.e. the thicker, heavyset horses built more for endurance than speed))
And yes, a horse could do a return trip, but it would need decent rest / feed first. You would not be doing this to them every day.
Many horses - including those trained for this - won't do this kind of trip at night, *especially* if there's rain (depth perception is an issue with horses so many spook at water because they don't know how deep it is, this is often worse at night even with horses that can navigate water during the day).
I don't know why the trip has to be at 2am instead of say, 4am when you could feasibly make it dawn in a place closer to the polar circles, or if there's urgency and therefore the horses can't be walking. As you can tell, there is a TON of variables to consider!! :D Additionally, what are they bringing along as feed? Grass is often not going to cut it. Foods like horsebread exist for a reason,
(Experience: Have ridden, trained in Natural Horsemanship, and have done many dedicated hours of research specifically into horses as transport for my own writing, which led me into an interest in horse marathons, which I highly recommend you look further into!)
Overall 15 kmh should be more than possible with horses used/trained to these distances already, and riders who are too. Riders not trained to those distances will fail faster than horses *and* make the horse's life difficult through not knowing how to move with a horse (they don't have to *know* the horse, but they *do* need muscle memory / control). Night is going to be a big issue esp given weather. Rural areas are not generally lit and not's not realistic to make them lit without a good worldbuilding reason, even areas that *only* used horses for transport back in the day were not lighting their streets. They were either not traveling at night OR they were often *whipping* a very well-trained horse and forcing them to do it (breaking in a horse was a very different journey compared to what we have today which led to both some truly bombproof horses, and horses that were like 'fuck off' except to very specific things and people lol). (And while it happens frequently in fiction, this was not a thing people were wasting horses on potentially otherwise, they are *worth too much.* So if you're writing a 'characters escaping in the dead of night' scene, if they care about the welfare of extremely valuable animals and you haven't given them a reason to have the horses used to travelling at night (which can be resolved with some dialogue), this is just not something someone would do to horses they cared for. It's not only something horses don't like doing, it's potentially fatally dangerous to both humans and the horses - the lack of depth perception + solid night vision is a BIG issue!!!)