Image: My mascot, You, appears in many of my bicycle touring photos.

I love bicycle touring. When I started, I didn’t have any bicycle touring gear and I didn’t have a clue. I had a lot of suffering, a lot of meaningful moments, and a lot of fun. Now that I’m a moderately experienced bicycle tourist, I have bicycle touring gear and lots of clues. With these, I have a lot of suffering, a lot of meaningful moments, and a lot of fun. Anyone can bicycle tour without special gear. Having special gear makes it a little easier, but overcoming challenges without easy answers can be rewarding and even fun with the right attitude.

That said, getting fancy gear that makes something easier is rewarding, too. My opinions in bicycle touring gear constantly change. I can only tell you why I like the gear I have right now.

Gear selection is a balance between comfort on the bike (less weight, less volume) and comfort at the campsite (sitting, sleeping, eating, entertainment). Gear can be comfortable, durable, and lightweight, but rarely is it all that and inexpensive!

The popular tent these days is the MSR Hubba Hubba NX. At over $300, it’s still on my wishlist and I make do with something cheaper. If you have a tent that is free-standing and doesn’t have to be staked down, you can set up on a concrete pad out of the mud and water, or maybe under a picnic shelter. Weight and volume are critical, so choose a smaller tent.

I’ve finally got the sleeping pad of my dreams, and it’s actually a cot. The Therm-A-Rest LuxuryLite UltraLite Cot is pricy, but a good night’s sleep is invaluable! This super lightweight cot puts me a couple inches off the ground. On hot nights air can circulate under me, and on cold nights it’s great to be up off the frozen ground.

To make the cot even cushier, I put a Therm-A-Rest Z-Lite Sleeping Pad, which folds up accordion-style. Many bicycle tourists just use this.

Sleeping bags filled with duck or goose down will compress into a tiny stuff sack that takes up very little space. I have a medium-weight bag that keeps me warm almost to freezing temperatures, but ideally I’d also like an alternate bag for milder weather.

The MSR Micro Rocket Stove takes up very little space, is lightweight, and boils water fast.

I love the Hydro Flask water bottles. They aren’t cheap for water bottles, but ice water stays icy in them for a long time. I recommend the standard or wide mouth that accommodate large ice cubes.

I don’t like to use a trailer on a bicycle tour. It allows me to carry too much stuff, and before I know it the weight is slowing me down to a standstill. Furthermore, a trailer tire is smaller than bicycle tires, requiring extra spare tubes and spokes. I prefer to pack my gear in front and rear panniers and a handlebar bag, strapping on anything that doesn’t fit. Ortliebs are the top-of-the-line panniers, which many of my friends use. I picked up a used set of Cannondales a couple years ago, and I like the multiple pockets, but I wouldn’t mind the spaciousness, bright colors, and water proofness of Ortliebs.

My non-essential luxury items are a tiny lightweight collapsible chair, and my mascot: a stuffed chicken named You. You show up in many of my photos, and You are a great conversation piece!

A common mistake people make when doing a bicycle tour is planning too much detail. It is perhaps theoretically possible to plan an appropriate number of miles to travel each day. But I have never heard of anyone actually doing that. The far more common story is too many miles and a huge amount of stress trying to make a particular destination by a certain day.

On my first bicycle tour, I reasoned that if I could bike 100 miles in a day, that I could bike 80 miles fully loaded in a day. It was brutal, and the relentless hills of northwest Missouri meant that my ‘easy’ 60-mile day was the longest and most exhausting.

A more reasonable number of miles for a fully loaded bicycle tourist is 40 or 50, but it depends on so many things (wind, hills, fitness) that I wonder if the best planning is no planning. An 82-mile day during my first bicycle tour across a flat part of Kansas with a tailwind ended up being the shortest day! If I’d planned only 40 miles that day, I’d have had energy and hours of daylight and nothing to do.

I repeated that mistake recently, on a 3-day shakedown cruise to test out my gear for an upcoming 6-week tour. I planned 55 miles a day for 2 days and 30 miles for the 3rd day. The first day was nice until near the end. I’d biked to Arrow Rock State Historic Site twice before, and I remembered it as being hilly. My memory was accurate. Those hills at the end of a long day beat us up and spit us out. I managed to get coals hot enough to cook hamburgers if I held the skillet close to the wet wood, but I was too tired to bother with the marshmallows.

It is a sad day indeed when you are too tired to set a marshmallow on fire.

The next 55-mile day was 100% hills. They were pleasant if tiring until we got to Glasgow where Hwy 87 is unpleasant and tiring. Hwy 87 goes down in my book as the hilliest road in Missouri, which is saying something, because I’ve bicycled over 2000 miles of Missouri highways. In addition to the hills, Hwy 87 has no shoulders and more than enough traffic. We decided to take our chances on the gravel roads in the floodplain of the Missouri River. While some of this route was flatter, I had to walk some hills for almost the first time in my life. I pride myself on my skillful and eager use of my lowest gears that allow me to climb any hill slower than you can walk it, but the steep gravel hills defeated me.

The gravel road included a low-water crossing with 5-inch deep mud. I was grateful for the weekly deadlifts in the gym class I go to, as I carried my fully loaded touring bike across that mud.

Even our final day, an ‘easy’ 30 miles on the flat Katy Trail, was rough because of a heat wave. We refilled our water bottles several times and used electrolytes liberally, but we were far more exhausted than we expected.

On the one hand, I hope that less planning and more flexibility will make my upcoming bicycle tour more enjoyable, but on the other hand, I have to admit that in a way I enjoy the suffering. I don’t enjoy it while it’s happening, but I love having done something extreme. I loved the peach cobbler I earned on the Glasgow hills. The Katy Roundhouse campsite felt like Shangri-La after endless pedaling. I love retelling stories of 30 mph headwinds and 5-inch deep mud.

I’ll let you know in a couple months what a bicycle touring experience is like with less planning!

Fear of traffic keeps a lot of people from bicycling. But it’s not always fear for their safety. It’s more like social anxiety. The road is a social place. It’s a place with rules of behavior. Everyone has their own ideas about what those rules should be, and we are very quick to judge anyone not following our rules.

As a social setting, the rules of the behavior seem to be simple. We drive on the right side of the road. We stay within the lines. Stop lights tell us when to stop and when to go. Speed limit signs tell us how fast we can go.

But it isn’t really simple at all. The rules are complex. The speed limit sign doesn’t tell us how fast to go– only the upper limit. Without any other guidance, people turn to the speed limit sign as dictating how fast to go. “I couldn’t believe I had to follow a car going 30 mph in a 35 mph zone for an entire mile,” someone might complain, as if the 35 mph means that is the speed you ought to travel, rather than the maximum speed you are allowed.

We are on the same road going different speeds, and angry with virtually every other user of the road for going the ‘wrong’ speed. And that’s when we’re all using roughly the same sort of vehicle with the same capabilities. When one of us is using a very different type of vehicle, such as a tractor, or a bicycle, it gets even more complicated.

It’s the threat of social ostracization on the road, even more than the threat to our safety, that deters many of us from bicycling. The thought of someone honking or yelling at us makes us nervous, even though a honk or yell can’t hurt us. The feeling is the same as when we agonized over what to wear in junior high– the honks and yells on the road are the equivalent of whispers and snickers in junior high.

The solution is the same as my solution to pretty much every problem in the world: walk and bicycle more. The more people who walk and bicycle, the more normal it will seem to you and to everyone else on the road. Your bicycling will overcome not only your own social anxiety over bicycling but others’ social anxiety too. Not quite bold enough to do it yourself? Ask a friend to join you.

Bicycle touring. All the cool kids are doing it.

It seems like everyone I know is bicycle touring this summer.

Maybe that’s not so surprising. Many of the people I know are people I met through bicycle touring.

My own bicycle tour this summer starts on August 2. I’ll bike from St. Louis to Kansas City– by way of the Boot Heel! I’ll bike 1400 miles in about 6 weeks, same as last year’s 40 Missouri State Parks tour.

Here’s a little primer about bicycle touring. Bicycle touring comes in several flavors.

Self supported means you carry everything with you, including camping gear and cooking gear. I’ve done several self supported tours, ranging from a single night to 6 weeks.

On a credit card tour, you eat at restaurants and stay in hotels.

You can join an organized ride, where someone else, such as Adventure Cycling, has worked out the logistics.

On a supported ride, your gear goes in a big truck. The first and most famous supported ride is RAGBRAI in Iowa. Missouri now has the Big BAM– Bicycle Across Missouri. The truck and the stops along the route are called SAG support.

Self-SAG, bringing your own vehicle, can be done with friends where you take turns driving.  This works really well with 4 people: 2 bike while 2 drive ahead and park the van. The 2 drivers then bike back to meet the others, then turn around and they all ride together.

I like touring self supported because it’s cheap and it’s hard to do. My dad likes to sleep in a real bed once in a while, eat at a restaurant, or drink hot coffee– he might like a credit card tour. Organized, supported rides can be a lot of fun, and they are very affordable compared to other types of vacations. Dad & I made good friends during Biking Across Kansas. But we also made very good friends during informal tours.

A bicycle tour can be any distance, any length of time. Overnight trips are easy to plan and don’t require taking time off work. A trip that lasts several weeks has unique rewards that can’t be experienced any other way.

For an amazing experience that will stay with you the rest of your life, get on your bike now, and don’t come back home until it’s happened.