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 ....   more »

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...   more »

Bicyclists can celebrate the opening of the final link of the Great Allegheny Passage with a fully supported bike tour that spins from DC to Pittsburgh this summer.

Dubbed the Greenway Sojourn 2007 by organizers Rails to Trails Conservancy, the bike ride takes advantage of 335 miles of unbroken bicycle path comprising the C&O Canal towpath (DC's Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland) and the Great Allegheny Passage (Cumberland to Pittsburgh).

The bike tour, limited to 500 cyclists, runs from June 23-30, 2007. The northbound tour provides camping ...   more »

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 ....   more »

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? ...   more »

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 ....   more »

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 ...   more »

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 ...   more »

Virginia has printed up a bicycle touring map for the state that includes major cross-state bike routes totalling some 800 miles, as well as a half dozen or more rail-to-trail bike paths and off-road mountain biking areas.

Bicycling in Virginia is also available online in two .pdf downloads at "full map" and the reverse "trail side."

One of the main features of the map are the two US bicycle routes that criss-cross the state. Route 1 runs north-south about from the DC suburbs, through Richmond and into southern Virginia. The east-west Route 76 essentially follows the old Bikecentennial (Trans-America) trail ...   more »