That's a neat goal. You may find you'll want every smidgen of advantage for yourself, comfort, efficiency, so I guess the idea of using one of the older bikes is very romantic, but see and assess then.
Yep, I will. I rode the crit bike on the ST and didn't find it to be a handicap in knocking out miles. It rolled out the miles well. Fatter tires would have given a more plush ride though. Tubeless would have avoided a lot of patching thorn flats. Still all in all I enjoyed the bike. Of course i will be 14 years older in 2026 than I was on the ST on the crit bike.
I am planning to do something I have never done for any tour, actually train specifically to be fit for the tour. We'll see if that actually happens, but that is the plan. Don't get me wrong, I won't be training with a loaded bike. I just don't do that. I may also start out with a better idea of how hard I will push the daily mileage than I usually do.
I hope to do a little shake down tour across Florida on one or the other of the two bikes in the fall/winter when it gets cool again, unless I decide to hike instead. It will be kind of a delayed wrap up of my ST ride since I stopped in Pensacola in 2012.