Originally Posted by
kopid03
thanks a lot for the help guys...i'm looking to buy a different bike this spring, looking for a used one in the $500 range or a little more. what features are good for a touring bike as opposed to just buying a normal road bike?
just for more information, i'm 20 and in college, so i dont' have a whole lot of money to play with.
Since I will only be going on one night trips mostly, I was thinking about buying MRE's with the chemical heaters so I wouldn't need to buy a stove. Anyone have experience eating MRE's? I figure I could handle them once a week, but I wouldn't want to eat them for days straight.
There is a lot that could be said here. I've gotta go soon though. There are others here who can offer lots of good information on these things.
You might consider doing forum searches with the search features that are available here. Or you could do advanced searches using Google, and limiting the domain to bikeforums.net.
There is a good thread about "cooking-free" foods that might help regarding stove-free touring.
There are various threads about finding good quality used (including older, long-chainstay, full-braze-ons) ATBs for use as touring bikes (or MTBs -- 'ATBs' is really more appropriate in the present context, though).
There is a lot of good archived information.