New website shares bicycle tour information

Are you looking for some ideas about a supported bicycle tour or independent bike adventure to take this summer? Or would you like to share one of your tours with the bicycle world?

Sample page from Cyclotouring.com

A new website called Cyclotouring.com is meant to be a resource that achieves both those results.

Started just a few weeks ago by Canadian cyclist and webmaster Michael McGoldrick, cyclotouring.com is a free service where anyone can share information about bicycle touring.

“The objective is to provide information about upcoming tours, review of past tours, proposals for tours, as well as short how-to articles about bicycle touring in general. Hopefully, it will serve as a resource for people planning cycletouring activities.”

Users can just click on the “Publish your text for free” tab at the top of the page to submit their articles and photos.

The articles are categorized by continents, countries and sometimes regions.

As the service just launched at the start of the year, there are only a couple of personal accounts. Most of the articles have been submitted by bicycle tour directors. There are a few “how-to” articles about bicycle touring.

Personally, I’d like to see more personal accounts of bicycle tours on the website; I certainly plan to submit a couple of those myself from my overnight bike tours in the Pacific Northwest.

Michael is a long-time bicycling blogger from the Ottawa area. One of his websites, GoBiking.ca, tells about paths trails and bike rides in the Ottawa-Gatineau area as well as Quebec and Ontario. Michael says his own bike touring is centered on 3- to 7-day bike rides in the Ontario and Quebec.

“Ideally,” he says, “the site (cyclotouring.com) would provide people with an idea of what’s possible for bicycle touring in a particular area, whether they are planning their own tour, or shopping for something that’s already been organized.”

Other resources for bicycle tours

If visiting cyclotouring.com only whets your appetite for more, there are several other excellent websites that take submitted articles about bicycle touring.

The grand daddy of them all is crazyguyonabike.com, which has thousands of personal accounts of bike tours anywhere on the globe. Many of those individual rides are updated on a daily basis so you can follow a favorite cyclist’s progress.

Another website that takes submitted articles about short bicycle tours is Bike Overnights. It’s slogan is “Don’t wait to go cross country. Go tonight.”

The website in a blog format is updated several times a week with personal accounts of overnight bike rides. An index lists articles from every state and many foreign countries. Many of the articles have maps.

For supported bike tours, the National Bicycle Tour Directors Associations has the Bicycle Tour Network finder that lists all of its members rides.

I should also mention the Across State Bicycle Tours listings at BikingBis.com. I’ve been updating these multi-day, mass bike tours for 2014 and have something for nearly every state.