Category: Bike travel

A 45-minute interview with Heinz Stücke is now posted online at TravellingTwo website. He talks about where he's been, how bicycle travel has changed over past 40 years, and what he thinks about bike paths.

At 70 years old, Heinz Stücke is still going strong.

The German bike traveler who holds the Guinness Book of World Records title as “most traveled man in history” is swinging by Canada later this year.

The TravellingTwo blog interviewed Stücke recently for a podcast that will be aired soon. They note that after bicycling in northern Canada, he'll begin visiting island-nations to qualify for the Guinness Book record of stepping foot on every country on Earth.

While Stücke just turned 70 on Jan. 11, he's been traveling by bicycle since 1962. He's logged more than 350,000 miles in nearly a 50-year span, mostly on the same bicycle …

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Sometimes a chance encounter made while traveling by bicycle can lead to a life-long undertaking.

Such is the case of Mike Church, 27, whose 10,000-mile bike tour across Europe and Asia with a small group of bicyclists has led to the founding and maintenance of a school in a part of Nepal that is far off the tourist track.

The Mikey Medium English School, named for Church, opened in 2008 with funds provided in lieu of wedding gifts to Church's marriage to Ali Sharp. Since then, Church's parents have helped their son raise funds for the project. Church grew up in Davidsonville, Maryland, and is now a graduate student in Montana.

Interviewed in the Annapolis Capital, Church said:

“It just goes to show you how surprisingly easy it is to make a difference. It's a wonderful thing. My parents and I have supplied the school, but it's not a heroic deed. In the grand scheme of things, it's a minor and painless exercise ……

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If the winter weather is getting to you, this video should remind you that good bicycle traveling days are ahead.

This 6:18-minute video is a compilation of photos taken on the Bike the US for MS 2009 cross-country bike tour from Virginia to Oregon that raised $25,000 for the charity.

According to Adventure Cycling Association's Bike Bits newsletter, MS biker Bret Taylor attached a digital camera to his bicycle and set it to shoot an image every 5 miles. He strung the images together ….

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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? ……

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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 …..

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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 …..

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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 ….

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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 ….

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