Lena

The order I would use:

1. Photograph everything before touching anything. Both bikes, both locks, the railing, the surroundings, timestamps. This is your evidence if any of it becomes a dispute.
2. Leave a note with a phone number on the other bike, and wait a while if you can. A large fraction of these resolve in twenty minutes with an embarrassed apology.
3. Report it to the police or, if you are on private land, to the building or business. A report before you cut anything is what separates you from someone stealing a bike.
4. Get the other bike's details recorded — frame number if visible, description — and check whether it has been reported stolen. If it has, this becomes a very different conversation and not one for you to resolve.
5. Only then consider cutting, and cut your own lock rather than theirs. Yours is your property and destroying it raises no questions at all.

That last point is the one people get wrong. Cutting someone else's lock, even to free your own bike, puts you in a bad position.

"Cut your own lock, never theirs" is the bit I would have got wrong under pressure. Photographing first and reporting before cutting is going in my head permanently.

The mental shift that helps: at a campground you are not defending against a professional with tools, you are defending against opportunism. Someone walking past at 2am who sees a bike they could ride away in four seconds.

That changes what works. You do not need a lock that resists an angle grinder; you need one that makes the bike not worth the ten seconds and the noise.

What that means in practice:

• Lock the bikes to each other. Several bikes cabled together cannot be ridden off and are awkward to carry. With three or four bikes this is most of your security and costs one lightweight cable between the group.
• Add a fixed object if there is one. A tree, a picnic table, a post.
• Keep them close and visible from the tent. Right outside, not around the corner.
• Remove the obvious escape. A quick-release front wheel through the rear triangle, or simply taking a wheel into the tent, means nobody rides away.

One route note: the app's suggested path is optimised for distance, not for how pleasant it is to ride. It will happily send you along a fast road with four lanes of traffic and a hill, when a slightly longer flat route through side streets exists.

Worth spending one weekend afternoon riding two or three alternatives with no time pressure. The route that is 800 m longer and avoids the climb and the bad junction is usually faster in practice and much less tiring.

The positional advice that reduced these events most for me, and it is counter-intuitive: ride further out.

Hugging the kerb feels safer and invites exactly the close pass and the left hook. Taking a clear position in the lane — far enough out that overtaking requires a genuine manoeuvre — means drivers either wait or move fully across. It feels more exposed for the first week and then you notice it has stopped happening as often.

The other one is eye contact at junctions. A driver waiting to pull out who has looked at you is a very different proposition from one who has not, and you can usually tell within a second which you are dealing with.