Originally Posted by
staehpj1
I tend to think that the dangers of that are extremely minimal.
First the part about not being home... There are much easier ways to know when a house will be empty. For one thing it would be a bad assumption that if someone is on tour that no one else is home at their residence. Many of us do not live alone so the only thing a would be thief knows is that one person from the household is away. I bet that more than half of bike tourist's homes are not empty when they are on tour. There are still likely to be spouses, housemates, parents, siblings, and offspring there. It would be much easier for the would be thief to just monitor the comings and goings in a neighborhood than to try to find someone who isn't home by reading journals.
I wouldn't worry too much about a would-be thief reading journals hoping to find details about someone who might be away, my concern would be more about someone who happened upon a journal and concluded from the journal who was away. Watching a house to observe the comings and goings takes effort and draws attention, while figuring from an online entry that someone probably isn't home and passing by a couple of times is much less visible.
As far as folks knowing where I am on tour and seeking me out... That seems like a huge stretch to me. Having a bike, some dirty clothes, and used camping gear is unlikely to make someone seek me out. If the goal is theft bike tourists would seem to be a pretty poor target. They might be a target for grabbing their bike or gear outside the library in a larger town, but seeking them out because of their journal... Not likely.
Depends on the nature of the tour. It doesn't take much reading between the lines of a journal and preparation log to figure someone will have a GPS (possibly $4-500 worth) to navigate, maybe an iPhone ($2-500?) for the overnight stays, maybe a Kindle ($200?) and potentially an emergency cash supply, on top of a bike that might be worth $50 but might also be worth $2500. I wouldn't expect a thief to travel any great distance in the hopes that their cyclist victim wasn't riding a $50 bike with a paper map and the kind of MP3 player you can't give away but someone in the area up to no good might misuse any information they can lay their hands on.
If the fear is that some crazed stalker will find me... Then I figure that I am better off worrying about more likely dangers like cars and trucks.
I'd just take a simple comparison of the benefits against the risks. Sure, the risks may be small. But what are the benefits? I'd say they were smaller still.