Category: Bike travel

The route of my 1984 cross-country bicycle tour is still pretty much imprinted on my brain.

So when Google announced it had created bike directions for Google maps, I was interested to see how its suggested route compared with the route I took 25-some years ago.

The result is at right. It's quite different than our actual route, below.

Google's route from Yorktown, Virginia, to Oceanside, California, is shorter than our meandering route. It bypasses some steep climbs and makes use of rail-to-trails that probably still carried freight trains when we traveled that way on our bikes. …..

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Just finished the story of Douglas Whitehead's bicycle travels across Europe and Asia in the UK Telegraph.

“The Bicycle Diaries: One man, one bike, 6,000 miles” is a good yarn by a 40-year-old Englishman who cut all ties to a normal life and takes off for 9 months across the unfamiliar territory of 19 countries.

After reading his wild and woolly tale, I'd say that training for such an adventure involves more than just trying to build up a good base of miles on the bike. You also need to practice:

Sleeping under bridges or in abandoned buildings;

Choosing ad hoc riding partners carefully;….

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We can become obsessed with mountains and the gravitational challenges they represent, especially when our bicycles are loaded with the necessities for long-distance touring.

Mountains also can provide some of the most memorable and unsullied scenery on our bicycle travels.

So it's no surprise that mountains, hilltops or long downhill runs accounted for the themes of the winner and most of the top runners-up in the 1st annual Adventure Cycling Association photo contest.

The winning photo, above, of a cyclist in red bicycling through the mountains of Tenerife on the Canary Islands was taken by Dutch photographer and cyclist Marco Meijerink …..

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Congratulations to Scottish bicycle traveler Mark Beaumont for finishing 13,000 miles of bicycle travel down the length of North and South America.

The 27-year-old left Anchorage in May and finished up at Usuaia in southern Argentina on Thursday. There he is at left celebrating from “the end of the world.” The bike tour took 268 days.

He interrupted his bike travels to climb, by foot, the highest peaks on each continent — Denali in Alaska and Aconcagua in Argentina.

Beaumont's name might already be familiar to you. Two years ago he completed his record-setting around-the-world bicycle trip, covering 18,000 miles in 194 days. His latest bike adventure was accompanied by a BBC blog and a constant stream of Twitters.

It's been interesting tracking Beaumont's progress, especially on his Twitters. Reading thoe posts was a good reminder that not every day of bicycle touring is the best….

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Probably the single most important project for bicycle travel in the United States is the U.S. Bicycle Route System.

The proposed 50,000-mile national network links the lower 48 states with numbered corridors running north-south and east-west.

The Adventure Cycling Association and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials worked together to identify those 50-mile wide corridors nearly 2 years ago. But it's up to the individual states to work together to create the on-the-ground bike routes that meet up at state borders.

And that's the problem.

Some states are charging ahead to pick bicycle routes to implement the plan. Others are lagging far behind or show no interest at all……

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Brett Tracy travels the western US by bicycle and uses his artist's trained eye to document the end of the industrial age.

While the end of the industrial age might not be an accepted fact, Brett sees evidence everywhere that humans are coming to the end of their industrial phase. He imagines that a more ecologically aware human-scale era will replace it.

His website is “The Illuminated Thread: a journey by bicycle into the murky unknown of the deindustrial age.” It's full of pictures, videos, audio and journal postings of his travels.

Brett is about to set out on a bike tour from Los Angeles to Houston. Along the way, he's planning to stop at desert water projects, failed alternative energy projects, utopian settlements, mines, dumps and aircraft storage yards. ….

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Stephen Allen is pedaling across the Pacific Northwest on the last leg of his around the world bicycle tour to raise money and awareness about living with epilepsy.

Allen left Telluride, Colorado, some 14 months ago and headed east on his Seize the World bike travels. Since departing, he saw 22 countries and sustained 3 1/2 seizures.

He flew into Seattle from Japan in December, and now he's pedaling his bike across Idaho after passing through eastern Oregon. He continues to give talks, like the one last week in Boise for the Epilepsy Foundation of Idaho, and use his laptop to update his website, SeizetheWorld.com.

Allen undertook the world bike tour to show that people with epilepsy can realize their dreams. He keeps his epilespy in check with medications. …

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Bicyclists who launch a long-distance bike tour to draw attention to a cause usually do so in the spring to take advantage of the summer bicycling season.

Not Don Ross. The 66-year-old Alaskan took off from Fairbanks on his cross-country “Ride for the Planet” bike tour on Oct. 3.

He figures that he'll draw more recognition about the problems of global warming if he makes his ride in the winter.

Ross has made it south to Eugene, Oregon, so far.

Riding a Giant bicycle and pulling a loaded BOB trailer, Ross plans to continue to San Francisco before striking east to Washington DC by Earth Day…..

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