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Bill  On The Road

 by: Bill Oetinger  9/1/1999

Cycle-touring: reinventing your life

Can you remember this feeling? You're a child...say, ten years old. You wake up on a sunny, summer morning, and you lie in bed for a few delicious minutes, contemplating the prospect of a day with an absolutely blank agenda: nothing and everything to do; nowhere special to go and everywhere exciting to explore; no responsibilities and infinite possibilities.  If you can remember that feeling, you can understand the attraction of cycle-touring.

Touring on a bicycle takes many forms, from the "Tour" de France to weekend club rides, from centuries to a cruise with the kids along the local bike path. But in this case, we're talking about that particular sub-set of cycling where you leave home and venture out into the vast unknown for at least a few days and maybe many days on end. In theory at least, you leave most of your domestic cares and entanglements behind and become, for a time, carefree and footloose...a wandering gypsy...one of the world's eternal children.

In fact, we know it seldom works out in quite such a perfect, Peter-Pan idyll. There are always a few reality checks along the road: the route turns out to be too tough; it's too hot or it rains; the bike breaks down; you get bit by bugs; the campground (or inn) turns out to be crummy; etc. But happy children do fall down and skin their knees and cry too, and still end up having a great day. It's all part of the crazy quilt of adventure. If you didn't have a few bumps in the road, you wouldn't have such colorful anecdotes with which to bore your friends later. Besides, if you wanted life to be risk-free, you could have just stayed home and watched adventure shows on TV.

Anyway, in theory at least, cycle-touring ought to be less arduous than several other forms of cycling. Unlike racing, you needn't spend hours at a time in a painful red haze of anaerobic deprivation and lactic acid overload, and unlike ultra-marathon rides, you needn't spend all day and half the night grinding on and on, popping Ibuprofin like M & Ms to dull the many aches and pains. No... ideally, each stage of a tour will be manageable and relatively painless. Just ambitious enough to make you feel you've done something significant, and long enough to guarantee that getting there is half the fun, or at any rate takes at least half the day.  Best of all, on each stage of a tour, you will roll--under your own power--into uncharted territory, discovering vast new vistas and scenic diversions around every corner. And unlike a race or other competitive bike challenge, you can take as long as you like or as long as you need to get from the morning's start to the afternoon's finish. No one is keeping score or counting coup. If you want to get off the bike and visit an historic site or sink your hot feet in a cool mountain stream, no one will nag you to keep moving. It comes as close to that childhood dream of aimless, heedless play as most of us "grown-ups" are ever going to get.

There are several, very different approaches to multi-day touring. You can load up your bike with saddlebags (or hook on a trailer) and haul your home around with you. This is the ultimate in cycle-touring: no sags, no support, and no leadership (in route planning, accommodations, etc.), but also complete freedom to go wherever and whenever you please, and for as long and as far as you like. On the other end of the spectrum are the fully-catered tours, where you shell out a bucket of money so that someone else can haul your luggage, plan your routes and lodgings, and scoop you up in a sag wagon when you grow weary. In between are any number of hybrid solutions to the problem of cycling away from home for days at a time, usually involving some form of cooperative group tour, with some sponsoring organization handling the logistics, and all participants sharing in the chores to some degree and also sharing in any savings derived from a non-profit budget.

Whichever traveling template best suits your temperment and pocketbook, the ultimate goal of all of them should be to recreate in you that feeling of waking up in the morning to a clean slate of a day, with nothing to do but ride your bike and enjoy the passing panorama...the discovery of the wide world around you.

Unfortunately, for most of us, our adult lives become almost entirely taken up with the treadmill tasks of our careers and with the trappings of our success: with the getting and keeping of wealth and the amassing of material possessions. It becomes all too easy to forget the innocent pleasures of simply fooling around, twiddling the day away on nothing more important than a lazy bike ride down a country lane. In diverting us--if only for a week or two--from the soul-deadening routines of work and everyday chores, cycle-touring can not only reawaken the child within us, it may even save our lives for us.

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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