Category: Bike Touring

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? ……

Continue reading

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 …..

Continue reading

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 …..

Continue reading

Drew Hunter's father, fiance and best friend rode across a rainswept bridge on the Massachusetts coastline on Sunday to complete a cross-country bike ride to raise funds for kayaking safety programs.

Dubbed the Tour de Hunter, the 5,000-mide bike ride honored the memory of Hunter, a 28-year-old former Marshfield resident who died in a kayaking accident in June.

One hundred friends and family met the trio as they finished their bike tour. Another 1,500 fans followed the bike ride over the past few months at the Tour de Hunter Facebook page.

Hunter's fiance, Jenna Seoane, and best friend, Brendan Cohen, started the TransAmerica bike tour in Astoria, Oregon, in July ….

Continue reading

The five-member Harrison family is more than 2,000 miles into a 7,000-mile epic bike tour from Kentucky to Alaska by way of Florida and Texas.

Bill and Amarind and their three children — Cheyenne (6), Jasmine (4) and Robin (3) — are undertaking the bike tour on a quintuple bike that can be reconfigured to a quad, triplet or straight tandem by decoupling some sections.

That's the family at left soon after taking delivery of the quint bike. What you don't see is their racks and trailer loaded down with enough gear to sustain them all the way from their home in Mount Vernon, Kentucky, to their destination in Fairbanks, Alaska, sometime in 2010.

In fact, that two-wheel bike trailer carried so much stuff that it would scrape bottom on some bumpy roads until Bill made some adjustments ….

Continue reading

Bike travelers on the Great Allegheny Passage pump about $40 million a year into the local economies and $7.5 million into wages along the 132-mile rail-to-trail from Cumberland, Maryland, to the outskirts of Pittsburgh.

Those are the not-so-surprising findings of the Great Allegheny Passage Economic Impact Study conducted in 2008 and 2009.

The report once again proves the “build-it-and-they-will-come” relationship between trails, bicyclists, and profitability to businesses in the vicinity, especially those that cater to bike travel.

Some of the major findings of the study:

— The $40 million was more than five times the impact of $7.26 million in 2001, when the Passage links had not yet been connected;

— On average, businesses attributed 25% of their sales to trail users …..

Continue reading

If you're planning a bike vacation to Oregon, you'll certainly want to include a stop at the Oregon Tourism Commission's Ride Oregon website.

I just stumbled across this resource recently and was amazed at the amount of bicycling information that's packed into the website.

There are some pretty pictures displayed on this big budget website, but there is also lots of solid, up-to-date information about bike travel in the state.

That's no wonder, when you see the steering committee and the contributors, which includes Jonathan Maus of BikePortland.org, Scott Bricker at Bicycle Transportation Alliance and the staff at Cycle Oregon …

Continue reading