Dutchman Frank van Dijk has a bike ride to finish.

Frank visited the US in 1976 to ride his bicycle cross-country that first Bikecentennial summer.

The 23-year-old joined hundreds who streamed from coast-to-coast to celebrate the nation's 200th birthday on routes mapped by what later became the Adventure Cycling Association.

Except Frank didn't finish.

A motorist struck Frank while he pedaled through Kansas. His head smashed through the windshield and his body sprawled across the hood of the car.

He spent several days in a hospital in a coma and suffered various fractures, contussions and lacerations. Then he returned to Holland ....   more »

Didn't Bob Dylan sing "...the signs, they are a-changin'"?

Maybe not, but I couldn't get that song out of my head when I read at Bike Portland that the feds were establishing new guidelines for signs and road markings that included changes that effect bike riders.

While some of the improvements deal with freeway signs and traffic signals, many changes involved making bike lane markings more uniform and establishing common signs for bike routes and paths.

The ones at left caught my attention at first.

The U.S. Bicycle Route signs will be used on the 50,000-mile bike route corridor network being established by Adventure Cycling Association and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation officials.

Those bike route designations are already being used for USBR 1 and 76 in Virginia. ...   more »

--Updated with more gran fondo events--

Amateur cyclists and recreational bicyclists in the US and Canada will get more opportunities to participate in Italian-style gran fondo bike rides in 2010.

Nearly a dozen gran fondo bike rides are scheduled next year in California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ontario.

Cyclists appear to be hungry for such events.

When 3-time Tour of California winner Levi Leipheimer launched a gran fondo-style bike ride in Santa Rosa last October, 3,500 cyclists signed up.

Word must have spread among cyclists, because when online registration opened on Tuesday for the October 2010 King Ridge Gran Fondo -- 10 months before the event -- half the 6,000 spots were reserved the first day.

In addition to Leipheimer's event in Santa Rosa, the Tour of California is sponsoring two gran fondos along the course of two Tour stages before the race in April. Centurion Cycling  is launching its first season of gran fondo with rides in California, Colorado and Wisconsin, and Gran Fondo USA is offering rides in San Diego and Philadelphia next year ...   more »

One look at the Weather Channel temperature map at left confirms that much of the US is locked in frigid winter weather.

If you layer up, you're probably OK for bike commuting or riding your bike on an errand, but long-distance bike tourists are in for chilly riding during the day and colder camping at night.

There are lots of bike travelers on the road, however. You'll generally find them in the Southern Hemisphere where it's late spring.

In the left column I've listed a baker's dozen bike tour blogs under "On-the-road bike travelers." Some are either approaching or south of the equater right now. What adventures are they having while the rest of us are slipping on our booties and tearing through our gear looking for balaclavas? ......   more »

When I wrote about Farmington, Missouri, opening a bike hostel in an old jail on the TransAmerica Trail this fall, I wondered how many hostels are primarily devoted to bicycle travelers.

I could name three off the top of my head from my TransAmerica trip 25 years ago -- Cookie Lady's Bike House in Afton, Virginia; Elk Garden, Virginia, and Pippa Passes, Kentucky.

We also bunked in hostels in Ordway, Colorado; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Hutchinson, Kansas.

When I started searching for more recently, it didn't take long before I stumbled across several websites with extensive lists of free or low-cost bike hostels .....   more »

Note: Dawn Lumsden of Canada and Finley Fagan of Australia are on a long-term, around-the-world bike tour with their two SPCA-rescue dogs, Jack and Paco. Right now, they're settled into a Berlin apartment for the time-being and are writing about their ongoing adventures at their Cycling Gypsies blog.

Dawn and Finley, aka Zoa and Fin, were kind enough to offer this story to the Biking Bis website. It tells what prompted them to embark on their bike tour, and how they chose some of the equipment for their unusual entourage.

A bicycle odyssey with dogs: Our customized rides 

“Cycling around the world? Ha! Yeah right... Bicycles are for around town, not for around the world.”

But my girlfriend was serious, and a quick Google search proved she was right. Thousands and thousands of cyclists were traversing countries and continents at any given moment. The idea seemed absurd, yet irresistibly epic. Sign me up!

Only one small problem. Well, actually one medium sized problem, and another big, hairy problem. Our two dogs! Can you believe it? Nobody wanted to look after them while we cycled carefree into the horizon .....   more »