Originally Posted by
Kahrpistols
Thanks for the replies, guys! I'm actually not from NJ, I'm from NC but living in NJ (for only a few more days!)
I said 1-2 weeks as a worst case scenario but realistically you are right, we probably do not need to go further than 3-5 days without a food resupply. We will be exclusively touring on the road. And yes, we will have water filtration systems instead of packing water.
This perhaps leads to another question: How much food does one person need while on tour? I currently ride 40 miles a day, hard, and eat in excess of 3,500-4,000 calories a day. If I have to keep up something similar to my current intake of food I will burn out of food quite quickly. Does touring 80+ miles at an easy pace burn considerably fewer calories than 40 at a race pace? (I have to keep up with cars around here to keep drivers happy and prevent them from driving me off the road so I usually reach speeds of 24-28 mph between stop lights.)
My plan is to start with a 1 week tour of the Blue Ridge Mountains to get used to the daily life of touring, and then after my international travels (non-bike), do the entire Parkway (~1 month?), then head over to the west coast and do a 3 month tour.
I saw this posting after I wrote my dissertation above about how much food two weeks worth of food is. I obviously did not get the message that you were going to be on the road where food is often available. I assumed you planned something like my Iceland trip were you were in the wilderness for a long time.
I would not be surprised if you eat 3500 to 4000 calories or more per day on a bike tour. Since you plan a 1 week tour to start, you will have an opportunity to find out how much weight you gain or lose with that caloric load in a day. You can assume 3500 calories is about one pound of body weight.
If you can limit your food to no more than 3 day supply on the bike, that would be great. When I did Pacific Coast, I tried to resupply every time I saw a Safeway store, which was about every three days. My Nelson Longflap bag (black saddle bag in photo) carried almost all the food, plus an occasional wine bottle.
We probably ate about 5 large meals a week in a restaurant too, sometimes that was a breakfast, sometimes lunch and sometimes a supper. Generally we did not plan restaurant meals in advance, but if we saw a good restaurant on the road we would often stop. Or, if the campground was near a community we might plan on eating supper out that day by riding from the campground for supper.