Originally Posted by
Flyboy718
I am a school teacher and have the entire summers off. One of the reasons I became a teacher is so that I can do long touring without having to wait till I retire some day and then may not even be physically able to do it anyway. Last summer was my first summer off and I was wanting to ride my bike across the country.
I had worked myself up during the year and then when it came time to do it, I instead decided to just go with the family to Colorado and camp for a month.
We are quickly approaching the summer and another opportunity for me to bike across the country.Anxiety is starting to creep in again. What's even worse is I was in the military and for some reason riding a bike alone across the country is causing me to overthink it.
My major concern is my safety actually on the road and being hit by a car. I plan to stealth camp when I decide to finally do this. Am I just weird or do you guys have bike touring anxiety sometimes?
My wife and were active tourists in primitive 1970’s and 80’s when cycle touring was more of a rarity, without guided tours and Internet support, and we even did a cross-country honeymoon. Since we were young and in love, we had minimal anxieties.
Reading the A&S threads, it is obvious that any cyclist should be worried being hit by a car, anywhere. There was even a recent fatality on metro Boston’s best MUP.
I haven’t read this entire thread, but I have expressed a specific anxiety previously, probably not posted here, on this Fifty-Plus Forum thread, “What do you find hardest about cycle touring now we aint spring chickens any more?”
Originally Posted by
Jim from Boston
My earliest cycling activities back in the 70s and 80s, were cycle-touring with my girlfriend-then-wife, including a honeymoon cross-country tour. Since then, I've been strictly a cycle-commuter, and sport road cyclist, mainly due to work and family lifestyle.
Last year, I avidly read the posts on BF about a perimeter tour of Lake Ontario, and I experienced some surprising mental discomfort that struck me as a sign of getting older.
While I would still enjoy riding about 50 miles a day for an extended trip, the thought of the uncertainty of finding a place to stay for the night was unsettling. (Our previous tours were all self-supported and self-guided. If I/we were to resume touring, it would at least be a credit card style, if not an organized tour.)
On that honeymoon though, finding a place to stay was a memorable part of the adventure:
I guess 30 years of a stable, predictable cycle-commuting lifestyle erodes that exhilaration of the uncertainty. One of the best quotes I have seen about the spirit of cycle-touring is this:
Originally Posted by
bikingshearer
A thought or two, based on personal experience.
… what's the hurry? One of the joys of touring is the singleness of purpose and absence of demands.
All you have to do is get there: you don't have to get there fast or get their first - and if you are touring with camping gear, odds are you can be incredibly flexible about what "getting there" means on any given day.
Embrace that. Don't let your tour become an exercise in trading one rat-race for another.
I think I can get back into that if the opportunity arises. 
Noting that you went camping with the family in Colorado last year, what are they doing this summer? (rhetorical question).
@jppe, a North Carolinan retiree posted a couple years ago on the Fifty-Plus Forum about his cross-country ride, with his wife driving a SAG vehicle. When met I them in Boston at the end:
Originally Posted by
Jim from Boston
… We then had a celebratory dinner at a fine Boston seafood restaurant (Legal Seafood Harborside). We re-hashed our respective cross-country trips, including the current one with Jeri’s point of view.
While jp was away from the table, I asked her how she liked the trip…”I had a blast.”…
A leisurely cross-country drive might be a nice family vacation, and alleviate your anxieties.
Last edited by Jim from Boston; 03-27-19 at 02:36 PM.