bikenh

Gave up driving at the end of April 2010. Don't have drivers license, or any state issued ID anymore. I live in NH and the rest of my family lives in OH...800 miles away. The fastest way to get there was by bike. I was riding the bike all the time...so why not. I had thru-hiked the AT in 1997 so I knew the bike would faster than walking. I still remember quite well the 'center point' of the first trip, back in 2012, was the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. I remember pulling up to it and then it finally hit me. I had just ridden my bike from NH to St. Louis, I gotta be off my rocker.

As a kid riding the bike all the time like kids do or even later on as an adult while riding I would never have even considered the crazy notion of riding the bike anywhere but around home. I would never go on a bike trip. LOL The joke was on me.

Love2Ride

I had done a few shorter tours, but always wanted to ride across Canada, so I finally did it as my millennium project in the summer of 2000. What an incredible experience!

robadr

It's hard to know exactly. I always loved bikes as a kid, and then transitioned to 10 speeds in the 1970's, including a week riding in the UK. Then it fell off the radar until my 50's when I started cycle commuting, and immediately got excited about the idea of more overseas trips. I've ended up doing trips in Australia, New Zealand, BC, QC & the Maritimes in Canada, SE Asia, Cuba, and did the west coast from Vancouver to Mexico to celebrate my 65th birthday. I love the idea of travelling simply, quietly, cheaply, under my own power, and with everything I need on the back of the bike (I generally camp when I can).

It was quite a few years before I realized the similarity to the 'cowboy image' imprinted on my young mind by all those TV westerns in my childhood. I became the cowboy, with his bedroll tied on the back of his trusty horse, riding into some small town late in the day, chatting up the locals in the local saloon, and gone the next morning. :-)

AngeloDolce

I'd done some occasional weekend rides with a local bicycle club (3-5 days staying at hotels). For the Pacific Coast ride, coincidence of 4 things
Lots to see and plenty of time - it was a good trip

DC Bike Blogger

I got seriously interested in bike touring by reading some of the thousands of online journals on another site (crazyguyonabike). I am getting ready to retire in the next few months, and plan to set off on my first self-supported, long-distance bike tour. I will be riding the Camino de Santiago, a Christian pilgrimage across northern Spain to the shrine of Thomas the Greater, one of Jesus' apostles, which is located in the Cathedral in Santiago de Compestella, in Galacia, Spain.

DropBarFan

In the 70's bike boom I got into racing bikes but books & magazine articles & BikeCentennial showed touring was feasible enough. Also my dad had done some bike-packing in his youth so I figured I'd try bike touring eventually. I did some car & plane/car touring which got to feel passive & boring. Took a long time but now the vacations are bike touring or ski trips.

teacherlady

One day in the summer of 1968, my father announced we were going to bicycle from our home on eastern Long Island (south of Stonybrook, New York) to Bar Harbor, Maine, about 450 miles. My little sister had just turned 8 and I was about to turn 11.

We hadn’t biked at all as a family. I rode to school and back, about 4 blocks each way. My dad had a green Schwinn Varsity left over from when he lost his license for drunk driving, but I had never seen him ride it. I had a Raleigh 3-speed I’d gotten for my 10th birthday, and my sister got a new Raleigh 3-speed for the trip.

We did a couple of very short practice rides, and set off. We had heavy car-camping sleeping bags strapped to our racks, and my dad carried a tent. My dad led the way on his green Schwinn Varsity, my sister was in the middle, and I took up the rear.

We were quite the sensation. This was 1968. No one we encountered had ever seen bicycle tourists, let alone a father with two little girls. We stayed in motels more often than campsites (My sister and I just didn’t have the endurance for “only 10 more miles” to the next camp site) and mostly people went way out of their way to be nice to us.

We didn’t quite make it to Bar Harbor. We only had two weeks, and I got a really bad cold, and we ran out of time. I think we stopped about 2 days shy of Bar Harbor.

In my memory, it was sunny every day, we ate lobster every evening and milkshakes every afternoon, and US 1 was a million lanes wide going in and out of Boston. The rollers along the Maine coast featured in my nightmares for decades. It was the best two weeks of my life until I met my life-long love.

And that’s how I got started bike touring.

stardognine

^^^ teacherlady, if this were a competition, you'd win. 👍 Cool story, thanks for posting. 😎

teacherlady

Thank you, stardognine.

MarcusT

There was this really cute girl at work who showed an interest in bike touring. I immediately bought a rack and panniers and told her I was planning a 5 day trip. She said yes and off we went. 30 yrs later, I remember more the forested roads and incredible views than the girl, but she was fun.

BikeWonder

So..... what happened with her!?

MarcusT

Shortly after that trip, she got engaged and went on to have a nice family. I instead quit that job and moved to an area where I could enjoy more outdoor activities.

schoolboy2 

Forty years ago, I worked with a guy who would tell me stories about bike touring down the Oregon and California coasts to San Francisco. At the time I was carrying a full load of engineering classes during the day and working full time on swing shift; the idea of having unstructured time to pedal and sight-see sounded really appealing. Eventually I graduated and my wife and I bought Nishiki touring bikes. We did a couple of four day leisurely tours along the Avenue of the Giants in California. But with kids to raise, we only did those two tours. Fast forward 30 years to 2012, I was riding with a friend and we were both lamenting stuff that we'd wanted to do but probably wouldn't ever achieve. For me, one of my big regrets was never riding from C2C across the US. As we started riding again, I realized I could break the trip into sections and doing it over three years. After the first segment from San Diego to El Paso, I was hooked on bike touring. I'm retired now and spent the summer riding across France with my wife and then came home and rode the coast from my home in Santa Rosa to the Mexican border. I'm off to Australia for the winter (their summer) and hope to do some touring there.

stardognine

^^ Avenue of the Giants is a great place to ride, as is most of Northern California. 👍 Those trees will keep you pretty dry, even in a good rain. 😎 I remember going through Crescent City, right near the Oregon state line, and having that strong wind lift me and my bike off the ground, for a second or two!!! 😳
Also, I had a sea lion sneak up on me, while I was reading & snacking. He or she just wanted a snack too. 😁

Miele Man

I got into touring by riding my bicycle to events outside of Toronto Canada where I lived at the time. A lot of times I thought I'd like to spend a day or two exploring the region around the event. Camping was a lot less expensive then that motels or hotels. Then I worked in Northern Ontario Canada where I discovered the plethora of logging/mining roads many of them hardly used anymore. That's where I fell in love with MTB touring. Later I modified my MTB to drop bar for more hand positions and better position on longer rides. Now people use trekking bikes or gravel bikes for a lot of that kind of riding. It's amazing what you can discover on back roads rides whether country roads or old logging/mining roads.

Here's an old image I took of a 3" x 5" photo of a Bianchi MTB I had before converting it to a drop bar. Note the long wheelbase and the exra water bottle cage and bottle BEHIND the seat tube. This is in Northern Ontario Canada at what used to be a sawmill. It was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1922.



I should go through my old negatives and see if I can find the one for this image and get a better print made. I know the entire wheels are on the negative.

Cheers

Miele Man

I also read "Journey Across a Continent" by David Gidmark.

It was about a cross Canada bicycle trip in t he mi-1970s and David did it on a cheap bike and with inexpensive gear. It was a real eye opener onto what could be done on a limited budget but with will power. After reading that book I though about other older tours that people did on bicycles that were not nearly as good as bicycles in t he early 1980s. I thought that if they could do it then I could do it now. Thus I embarked on many wonderful two-weeks long bicycling tours.

Cheers

rossiny

Inspirational reading these stories. I would like to just take some time off work and do some small touring fir beginning. I guess I have to sell off a rental property that is my responsibility to maintain
... always an excuse with me?? 🙄
Maybe will try a couple day one and see how goes. I eventually do want to sell any extended touring could be cut short by a call from a tenant saying they need maintenance...

Jim from Boston

What set you off and started you touring? It was interesting to read of these overtures to cycle touring, especially from my contemporaries in the 1970’s.˅˅˅˅

Jim from Boston

˄˄˄˄

Speaking about Bikecentennial,

tspoon

I went on my first tour in Jan 2004, at the age of 31. Leading up to it, I was several months out of a messy marriage split, 15kg over weight, and had never been fit in my life. I started cycling around my small town every night, about 12km in total, out of boredom and a feeling of self-disgust. I found a late 80's road bike second hand for $90 with those sewn up tires, a campag groupset and some cool mavic hubs, and started some slightly longer rides out into the country side. I then did a 3 day try-out ride of about 250km. On the last day my knees were absolutely shot from using too high a gearing. A passing roadie advised me to use lower gearing with higher cadence, advice I never forgot. I bought a new bike for the trip, a fairly heavy 3x8 'hybrid' or whatever they called them back then.
The trip itself was over 20 days, 2200km, from Taranaki to Cape Reinga and back, in NZ. I've never done a trip longer than 4 weeks, as they need to fit around holidays, but that may change in future.
Cycling has been a life changer for me, in terms of physical and mental health.

Prowler 

A Series of Fortunate Events.

196? my older brother packed his Schwinn Continental and with 4 friends left Schenectady, NY and rode to Provincetown, MA on the tip of Cape Cod. Stayed at Youth Hostels along the way. I monitored his progress with fascination but did not do a similar trip.

College, kids, houses, careers, etc and no cycling. At one point I took my Schwinn Varsity up to the transfer station. Tired of looking at it. Too old for drop bars.

Then 2003 or so, my college son scammed a raffle on campus and won a Huffy mtn bike. Ignored it for a couple of years and gave it to me. I started riding again. Got more and more interested. No touring.

By 2018 the Huffy was gone but I now had 10 bicycles including a Schwinn Voyageur that I bought for $15. It needed everything which is what it got. Then listened to a friend talking about riding the GAP/C&O in 2019. "Oh that sounds great but I'm too old for that. Or am I? Should I? You aint getting any younger." Fits and starts and creeping progress lead to my first and, at this point, only tour. GAP journey. So, unlike youse all, my long history of touring is one trip so far. This past August. I'm now looking at a second touring bike - 1984 Fuji Touring Series III. I do not need another bike but I'm strangely intrigued. We'll see.

seedsbelize 

Last year, about this time, I bought a bike off CL in NE Ohio(1980 Trek 414), and needed to get it to SE Ohio. I decided to ride it, which I did, in May. I've now begun planning next Summer's tour, on a coupled 1984 Schwinn Letour Luxe. Light touring only for me.