After reading/scanning through 7 pages of this thread, a thought comes to me. It seems from statements above that in current-day randonneuring, all different types of bikes are used (tandems and recumbents are fairly common, for example). And, in the Long Distance forum and on randonneuring forums, I find very little discussion of the "right" bicycle to be used. The original post mentions about how rare purpose-built randonneuring bikes are. Mightn't it be that they are rare because most old-time randonneurs didn't bother using them then, either? Or to put it the other way, perhaps 95% of the randonneuring bicycles ever used wouldn't be recognized as such because they didn't fit someone's current idea of what a randonneuring bike should be?
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"be careful this rando stuff is addictive and dan's the 'pusher'."