Originally Posted by
alan s
Not a big fan of CGOAB. First off, the name of the site is insulting to mentally challenged people. Plus it puts bicycle tourers in a bad light. Second, it is a vehicle for endless repetitive entries. I stayed with X person and had an awesome meal of Y. How many times can you read that? Third, I don't need to preview my trip. Just go and enjoy. Having said that, IF I planned to travel to Elbonia or some other equally obscure place, perhaps it would be a good resource. Not there yet. Still have to ride all the beaten paths first.
oh I dunno, for me the name works because for any of us who have toured for a long time, you just know that's the view of us by some folks travelling by car.
I have two memories decades apart that fit this exactly, one coming up the west coast of France and repeatedly meeting a family travelling by car at those "lookout" spots at the side of the road, they obviously were taking long breaks at them as I was always catching up to them-but you could see in their eyes that I was a "crazy guy on a bike" working hard and carrying all that crap on my bike, and seeing them over and over (ok, maybe it was only twice or three times, but it was funny running into them again)
Twenty years or more later, biking from Montreal to Boston during a summer heat wave, pulling into a hardware store to ask for some new cold water from their tap, and a real friendly (and rotund) fellow behind the counter asked me about my trip after letting me fill my bottles from their water cooler, and then said, "Don't take this the wrong way, but why didn't you just drive your car?"
re the quality of CGOAB, sure it can be all over the place, but it certainly is a great resource for real world cyclists route info and other good tidbits of info about an area if one is interested in biking there.