View Single Post
Old 07-01-21, 05:12 PM
  #26  
djb
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Montreal Canada
Posts: 13,192
Mentioned: 33 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 2732 Post(s)
Liked 955 Times in 785 Posts
Originally Posted by Paul Barnard
I have started typing this thread out several times over the past year or so and have always bailed because the topic became too big. Let me see if I can really strip it down to the basics and not be so short on detail as to make it worthless.

Let's dismiss gear. I have a bike and decent touring gear. I want to do a tour. A blended tour if you will, where I stay in hotels at least every other night and camp some along the way. I don't want to cook. I want to tour out West in some remote or semi-remote areas. I envision flying out or doing a one way rental car to the starting point. For my grand tour, I am thinking of making this last anywhere from 2-4 weeks. It will be my retirement gift to myself. I have done RAGBRAI FWIW and will do some shorter shakedown tours before I do the big one. I have read a touring book, but it didn't really help me fill in the blanks.

I feel certain people have done this, but when I start looking at a map and thinking about logistics, I start drawing blank. I'd need a town with some kind of lodging every other night. In that town I'd need to be able to find up to 2 days worth of food to carry with me until my next stop. It would need to be food with enough protein/nutrition/calories to fuel quite a bit of burn. So food is a question.

Some of the places I would like to go are arid climates with significant distances between town. Camel back, bottles in cages and some in the panniers? It's suck to be 40 miles out of Ely Nevada and run out of water on a 100 degree day. Help me think my way through hydration.

Obviously route planning is a huge part of any tour. I have done a good bit of reading and have yet to find anyone who has done a route on the hybrid camp/hotel theme. The Trans American trail looks like it may work, but I haven't found the right kind of reading on it yet.

This may seem odd. Down time is a concern in remote areas. It seems that 50 miles a day is a fairly normal touring day. At an average of 8 MPH, that's about 6 hours of riding. Add in 8 hours of sleep and that leaves 10 hours of down time. Now, I can be very happy roaming around on foot, taking photos and other such touristy things, but leaving the bike and gear unattended is a concern. I don't really get bored on the bike, but is boredom an issue the rest of the time?

Just some things on my mind. Help me sort this out if you don't mind.
as you plan to do some pre tours, this will be the best way for you to get a handle on what amount of food you need for a given time riding, out on the bike. Same goes for drinking, real world stuff in varying temps.
I've never toured in areas where I had to carry 2 days of food and water, so I personally would have to extrapolate from what I know , and would obviously err on taking a bit more than I t hink I need.

re being bored. You know, it always amazes me how on top of actual riding time, stopping to take photos, buy a snack, eat, whatever, a wrong turn here or there--- all adds up, and anyway, you get to the campground / motel / middle of nowhere or whatever, you have to set up your tent, take a shower (or not) and wash your riding clothes and hang up to dry, or at least clean your feet and underbits well, and then its time to get supper prepared cuz you're hungry...so that takes time, then you need to maybe wash up stuff, organize all your crap in the tent so that you dont waste time in the morning, brush your teeth, maybe clean your chain........all this is to say that time flies by, and really truly, I never have time to be bored.

or if I do have time, hell, its nice to just sit and relax and take a load off your arse and feet and just look at the world.
oh, and getting to sleep early is underappreciated--getting a good nights sleep of 8, 9 hours is fantastic for your body to recover, and in my experience, essential to keeping strong day after day after day.
Crucial to how well you feel the next day, and to avoid getting run down on a long trip, which can lead to getting sick, which will make you feel more run down....you get it, you gotta take care of the old bod, especially as a fellow old geezer.
djb is offline