Category: Bike Touring

For more than 30 years, June Curry has been serving cookies and lemonade to TransAmerica bicycle tourists on the steps of the Blue Ridge mountains in Afton, Virginia.

Her efforts earned her the nickname “Cookie Lady” to more than 14,000 cyclists who passed through. After they ate the cookies and drank the lemonade, or spent the night in the “Cookie House”, June would snap a Polaroid picture of her visitors. They'd sign the photo and the guest register and be on their way.

Most of those Polaroids are now available online at The Cookie House Registry at the Crazy Guy on a Bike website…

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More week-long bike tours are updated at my Across State Bicycle Tour page.

While checking the dates and routes, I unearthed the minor news that Bicycle Idaho has been scrubbed this year, replaced by the new Washington Bicycle Ride in 2007. The organizers, the same folks who do the Oregon Bicycle Ride, moved the operation across the border for a ride through rural eastern Washington.

Fear not, Idaho bicycle lovers. The Treasure Island YMCA is putting on Ride Idaho for the third year with a 400-some mile loop starting in Coeur d'Alene.

Here are the other updated tours, listed by state …

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Pablo Garcia found more than he bargained for on his worldwide bicycle tour.

The bicycle tour started as a solo venture by the Argentinian cyclist, who embarked from South Africa in 2001. He bicycled up the African continent and reached Egypt in 2004. He then rode around Northern Europe before taking on the Mediterranean countries.

That's when he met, and married, Clara Vicari, an Italian grad student ….

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2006 marked the 30th anniversary for the Bikecentennial summer, when some 4,100 bicycle tourists hit the highway and rode the TransAmerica bicycle route to celebrate the nation's 200th birthday.

The Bikecentennial group is still around under a different name, Adventure Cycling Association. The group is still based in Missoula, Montana, and boasts 42,500 members, up from 7,500 in the early years. It's the largest nonprofit cycling organization in the country.

The hometown newspaper, the Missoulian, interviewed Adventure Cycling's executive director about the group's plans…

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Are you wondering how you're going to be spend your vacation this summer? I've updated more listings for Across-State Bicycle Tours, which might give you some ideas.

These are fully supported, mostly week-long bike tours operated by nonprofit groups to show off the wonders of the various states. I have updates for LABBRAU, GRABAAWR, SAGBRAW, BRAT, OBR, XOBA, among others. That means I've been working in reverse alpha order to update bike tours in Wisconsin, Washington, Tennessee, South Dakota, Oregon and Ohio.

For more updates ….

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Who is my top bicycling hero? Lance Armstrong — warm. Greg LeMond — warmer. Freddie Hoffman — bingo!

Why Hoffman? For starters, he's ridden his bicycle to the moon and back, twice.

Hoffman, 48, was born with an oxygen deficiency. It led to developmental problems that caused him to be ostracized by his classmates and peers. He turned to his bicycle for companionship.

Inspired by watching astronauts travel to the moon, Hoffman got it in his head to turn his bicycle into a virtual spacecraft and pedal the distance to the moon — some 240,000 miles — here on Earth. Bicycling nearly every day, Hoffman has covered 1.3 million miles.

How did he do it? …

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I was looking for something to read me off to sleep the other night and pulled “Travels with Charley” by John Steinbeck off the shelf.

Within a minute of cracking the cover, I was pulled back 25 years to the first time I read the book and found a voice that explained my desire to make a cross-country bicycle trip.

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age ….

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Congratulations to the Allegheny Trail Alliance for earning the inaugural Pacesetter of the Year Award from the Adventure Cycling Association.

The Allegheny Trail Alliance is a coalition of seven volunteer groups in southern Pennsylvania and western Maryland that have created the 150-mile bike and hike Great Allegheny Passage.

Because of their efforts, touring bicyclists can hop onto the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Towpath in Washington DC and bicycle all the way to Pittsburgh on a trail free of vehicle traffic, except for a couple of missing links …

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The story I wrote for Saturday about the new Bicycling in Virginia map sent me searching through my box of old biking info in search of an old Bikecentennial map.

It had been awhile since I'd scrambled through this stuff, and I was shocked and awed by the sheer amount of stuff that I'd picked up during a cross-country bicycle tour in 1984. I gathered up the armload of maps, brochures and books I collected on the trip, put it on the bathroom scale, and discovered it weighed in at 8 pounds!

Not something to be proud of, especially in these days of striving for ultralight cycling.

What was in there? The heaviest item was my journal (shown at top with the Olympics Summer Games sticker). And of course I had a set of maps and guidebooks …

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