I Don't Know Where To Start
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.