djb

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.

Paul Barnard

Thanks for your thoughts. Especially those about boredom. That makes sense to me.

Paul Barnard

I built the bike from the frame up. I feel confident that I can handle any mechanical issues. I have a good idea of what tools to take. On the gear/equipment side of things, I feel pretty good.

Paul Barnard

One of the issues with the way I want to do it is that if I want to have motels to stay in, I'll probably have to make reservations in the smaller towns. Some of the towns I have researched only have one "inn."

Tourist in MSN

Great.

I have occasionally done some work on other bikers bikes in campsites, thus have seen how things often go wrong at bad times. So, I thought I should mention it.

If you bring a cassette lock ring tool but do not want to carry the weight of a chain whip, I started this thread several years ago describing an alternative.
https://www.bikeforums.net/touring/8...l#post13982584

staehpj1

Yeah I can see that, but are small town motels actually booked very far ahead other than just a few in places or could you maintain a fairly flexible schedule and book only a few days ahead where required?

I don't know the answer for your tour, but I have generally been able to find a room when I wanted one on my tours. That was only once in a while for me so I am not a good test and there are places that are certainly booked solid during tourist season.

It would help a great deal if your schedule put you in the places like Yellowstone at a time when you'd need rooms on sunday-wednesday nights when the demand was lower rather than thursday-saturday nights. Also I'd think it gets better after labor day.

Additionally since you are doing a mix of camping and moteling, missing a room one night here or there because of no vacancies would be less of a disaster.

I guess it boils down to how comfortable you are winging it as you go. I'd be inclined to start out with no reservations or only ones a day or two ahead and adjust how far ahead to make them based on what the reality on the road was. If you are more of a planner who likes things nailed down and either likes or at least doesn't mind having a fixed schedule then booking everything may be better for you. It would kind of spoil the trip for me.

Whichever way you go have a great trip.

GhostRider62

Leaving Astoria in early May? Bring lots of down and a snow shovel. The passes should be fine by early June. I rarely carry much extra food and with the Trans Am route, there are plenty of food spots although there are three stretches where you have to be careful. WRT water, just bring a Sawyer Squeeze attached to a 2L Evernew bladder and 2 water bottles. There is water everywhere pretty much. Food? Just stop and buy what is available. I rarely carry a stove anymore when bike touring or backpacking.

Planning day to day? You will throw that out the window within the first week. Motels are not hard to find during the week but more challenging on weekends or during salmon run time.

I think a tour is more fun when you don't plan. Some of my best ones were when I just went from village to village and stopped whenever I wanted.

The ACA electronic maps to load on your Garmin have every single piece of information you could want.

indyfabz

Don't always expect someone to answer on the first try. Some are owned by people who have "day jobs" and other things going on in their lives. The funniest incident I experienced was on the TA in Wisdom, MT. We decided to get a room in the small motel in town to escape the mosquitoes. When we got to the place there was a note on the office door saying the the owners were at a family function in other town and would be back later that night. There were room keys in separate envelopes taped to the front door. The note invited you to pick a room and "settle up" when the owners returned.

djb

A few more thoughts.
- having built up your bike is a big advatage, you have mechanical skills, but more importantly, you have the ability to know if all is well with your bike, and to recognize any slight problems before it gets to the broken down stage.
example, on a 6 week trip, on a rest day, doing my bike clean, oil chain, inspection routine, I noticed the front hub cones had some play in them. (First for me on a trip) so being in a large town I found a bike store and the owner whipped out his cone wrenches and put it right.
Someone who never works on hubs would never have noticed.
Another time I met a guy who had been hit by a car a bunch of days earlier, and upon checking over his bike, was riding with a front hub with a bent axle, super hard to turn it. He was oblivious to this and noticed it was hard to get going but once going thought it "was fine"
so yes, first hand knowledge is useful

-second thought. Years back some friends did a hotel trip and for various reasons they booked every
night (week long trip ish) but then bad weather either put them off schedule or they had to hump their keesters to keep on schedule, I don't recall, it was many years ago. All I recall is initially saying that it didn't seem to me to be a good idea to do that, but they were nervous about not getting a place and wanted the reassurance of it all before.
IMO not the way to do a trip and could easily work against you if you have this type of personality bicycle traveling.

Tourist in MSN

Regarding how far to go each day and how far in advance to plan, all I can say is what I do.

Camping, some people do a lot of wild camping or searching for places where they might ask if they can camp for the night. I do not do that, I always strive to camp at a real campground. That said, you will be riding through long distances in a rural part of USA that might not have many conveniently located campgrounds, so you might find that you need to do some wild camping.

I almost never make campsite reservations in advance, but if I am staying indoors somewhere I almost always do make reservations in advance. That said, if I was on a bike tour and planned to camp on memorial day weekend or labor day weekend, I would probably want to make reservations. My last bike tour, I was at a Canadian Provincial Park campground with about 80 campsites, I heard one of the staff say they only had two empty sites, things can get crowded at times.

Each day I look at the next several days worth of distance and try to see if there is a stretch where I will have to go a long way on one day, because if there is then I try to make sure I am at an appropriate spot on the morning of that long day. But if not, then each day I am inclined to decide in the evening how far I want to go the next day, part of that is based on campsite locations and part based on wind forecasts.

The vast majority of the time when I set a target like that, I hold to that target that day. But there are days with a strong tailwind that I hate to waste, so I might get to my destination and then reassess and decide to push on for another 10 or 20 miles. And there are those occasional days that I just can't make headway into the wind so I throw in the towel early. I recall one day when the wind was so strong that I could not get up a hill, it was not that steep but pedaling into gale force winds with gusts from the side that tried to blow me off the road, I quit early that day and made camp at 10:30am. Next day, it took me less than five minutes to get up that hill.

I usually try to be on the road between 7 and 7:30am, but often actually get rolling closer to 8am. I prefer cool weather over hot, and an early start is usually cooler with less wind. And that early, most of the traffic are drivers that drive that road every day so they will notice anything unusual, like a biker with a flashing taillight. And that early, there are fewer drivers too. The exception is in an area with a lot of agriculture that is labor intensive, like fruit or vegetable picking, then that time of morning might have a lot of traffic.

You will figure out what works for you. There is no single answer and a lot of this is personal preference. I often am rolling out of a campsite before I have seen any movement in other sites, so I am not sure what the norm is for most other people doing bike touring.

If you plan to stay indoors two or three or four nights a week, you may need to have really good cell service.

A backup contingency for cell service is really nice to have, such as a voice over internet way to make a phone call on your phone when you have wifi. You can usually get wifi at community libraries and often at restaurants. I have a Google Voice account and a phone number attached to that account. I can make a phone call anywhere I have wifi, even if I have no cell service. I can only be called on that Google number when my phone is turned on and wifi is also turned on, which is pretty close to never, so I just assume I can make calls but can't be called. Google Voice will store voice mail messages and send me an e-mail with any voice recording that I can listen to later when I have wifi. I have made reservations to stay indoors where I had wifi but no cell service that way. And my foreign trips, I have not gotten local sim cards in the past and my cell plan does not have an international option. So, when traveling international, Google Voice is my only option to make a call. I called one of my credit card companies from Budapest and another credit card company from Reykjavik when my cards stopped working by using Google Voice. I think it is a contingency that every traveler should have.

headwind15

The best piece of advise I can offer is: KEEP YOUR FIRST TOUR POSITIVE. I will never forget my first tour (in A good way) Hitchiking down to San Diego at the end of June. Spending the first 4-5 days at the beach either swimming or joining other people for volleyball games. Showers at the beach and then finding an empty lot to camp in, and then doing the same routine until I finally started touring back up to the bay area. Come up with a formula that seriously appeals to you.

101stairborne

If you wait for all the lights to turn green you are never going to get to town.

andrewclaus

I'm going to use this. Good saying. I don't know how many times, on my long trips, I've run into people who say they'd take a long trip if they only had the time. My reply is you'll never have months of open time--you have to make it and that takes work. I can't imagine a life where there's nothing to do for the next two or three months--that would be horrible.

Another group of people say they'll do it "someday." To them I list the days of the week, and say, "There is no Someday."

Tourist in MSN

My longest bike trip before I retired was six days, which included two days of driving, most of my canoe trips and kayak trips were roughly a week long too. It was not until I retired that I could take longer trips. Thus, I certainly understand those that can't take long trips.

That said, short trips teach the skills and mindset you need for longer trips. So, do the short trips, even if you do not have much time. And you can get a lot of experience from ACA group trips too, you don't get the route planning experience from those but you do gain other pertinent experiences.