Originally Posted by
antokelly
but hey doing 100 miles a day for 8 days ..
can you see a point touring like that i certainly cant .
I can ... but then I'm into long distance challenges like randonneuring and 24-hour races.
I figure there are two ends of the scale with tours:
1) Tours where you ride a little bit and sight-see, relax, take it easy ... maybe use alternate methods of transportation to get around, maybe participate in other activities like say, canoeing around a small lake just for fun, or going on hikes, etc. The goal might be to get to know another area a bit better, to get to know some new people, to see and try different things.
2) Tours where you challenge yourself to cover a certain distance in a certain amount of time, and where it is all (or mostly) about the bicycle and riding. RAAM would be an extreme form of this sort of tour. A tour where you ride 100 miles a day for 8 days is at this end of the scale ... it's a challenge. The goal is not sight-seeing or getting to know an area (although that may happen while cycling). The goal is to accomplish the challenge the rider has set out for him/herself.
And there are lots of variations of these two.
Because of my long distance cycling, I have a tendancy to lean toward the second one. I get out there and want to ride like I ride when I'm training for a long distance event, especially since there is usually a long distance event right in the middle of many of my tours. But I'm working on separating the tour from the long distance event ... ride easy, sight-see, do other things before and after the long distance event, and ride long and hard during the long distance event.