Tag: Touring

For years I’ve daydreamed about biking from DC to Pittsburgh on mostly car-free dirt trails, on a ~330 mile winding route that combines the C&O Canal Trail (a dirt trail formerly used by mules to pull cargo barges along the C&O canal in the 1800s, a transportation method that eventually lost to the railroad, and was nearly converted to roads before being preserved as a park in the 1970s) and the Great Allegheny Passage (a combination of rail trails integrated and completed in 2013). ...

Bornholm: a large Danish island in the middle of the Black Sea, reached by ferry from Sweden, Germany, or Poland. It’s relaxing, lush, pastoral… and some might even say a little boring. I love it– there are smokehouse for fish (optionally served with an egg yolks), a few cute towns, breweries, ice cream, beaches and forests… and most notably for this blog: ~230km of interconnected cycle trails around and through the island. ...

(retroactively writing up a quick summary, months later…) I’ve dreamed about doing some sort of week+ off-road bike tour somewhere in the world. While I enjoy solo DIY exploration and have many great memories of going somewhere and figuring it out on the fly, my gravel touring experience is limited and I’ve never even really been mountain biking (at least, farther than a few miles), so perhaps it would be easier and more fun to join an organized tour… ...

I never really got into “mountain biking”, because for years I associated it with going fast on rough terrain and dodging obstacles, while I like to ramble and mosey and stop a lot. I also like rides where I can walk out my door (or hop off a train or plane) and get on the bike without having to drive somewhere. I realize my impressions were a narrow caricature of what mountain biking can be, though, and I’ve always enjoyed the bits of off-roading that sneak into rides– the last mile of dirt getting to a camp site from the road, strange muddy paths I find myself on when trying to bypass roads, or detours through parks to avoid main roads, and even when “road biking” I generally run 32mm+ tires to give myself more comfort and flexibility for unexpected detours. ...

I’m back from a euphoria-inducing 8-day, 600-mile bike camping tour across Iowa and Wisconsin. The ride combined RAGBRAI (a 15,000-person group ride across Iowa with pork chops, pie, live music, and beer in tiny towns along the way) and a solo ride across beautiful, rural Southwest Wisconsin. The mix of mostly good weather, wildlife (fireflies, startled rabbits, and red-winged blackbirds), friendly strangers, no email, the ability to improvise and change plans on the spot (the flexibility of carrying a tent…), and plenty of time to ride alone and drift between states of present observation and introspection are why I always come back to bike touring… ...

Thanks to Jason and Erica and Cat, I got to go on an interesting 120-mile bike tour up to Wisconsin and back while I was visiting Chicago, and I didn’t have to do any of the planning. (rhetorical question: who rides 120 miles to a Super 8 motel at the edge of a cluster of strip malls, just for fun?) I was less interested in any specific destination than I was in checking out a variety of towns, environments, and regional cycling infrastructure (impressive!), and this ride certainly delivered. ...

Three weeks of solo bike touring and camping, across 600+ miles of The Netherlands and Belgium. Riding over massive man-made dikes, on paved bike paths cutting through dark forests and rural farm fields (where I might not see another person for hours), to Trappist breweries and old towns, along canals, on muddy back roads and unsigned border crossings, and to a bonfire with a band playing under a rusted crane. ...

Yesterday I biked for about 13 hours (with breaks), maybe 200km (120 miles), twice as far as I’d planned. The weather was perfect, I had a tailwind, navigating was easy, and I was in a euphoric cycling state of mind. So when I reached my planned campground around 4, I kept going… and only when it started to get dark after 10 (solstice, moderately high latitude) did I think about stopping. I even found myself idly thinking about biking all night because I was in such a good mood– but fortunately common sense took over before I did something that crazy (I was out of food and water, only had a small light, canal ferries wouldn’t have been running). It’s a sickness, I tell you!

Planning out the next few days of biking (after a week mostly off the bike, hanging out with friends). Gold = past destinations, copper = planned route.

And I’m done. Netherlands and Belgium crossed by bike. Now meeting three friends I’ve known for 14 years, in Brugge. Bike adventures may resume next weekend.