When I had under 80 posts, I had a couple 1200K randonnees and some touring under my belt already. I came here as an experienced cyclist. As for searching, I searched on the word "definition".

But my pet peeve with these sorts of threads is that there are some people who want to create a definition of touring in order to determine whether they themselves are real cycle tourists or not, and/or in order to classify other cyclists. It leads to elitism ... 'my cycletouring accomplishments are better than yours because my tour was this and that, and yours wasn't'.

As I say in one of those links, when someone says they are going on a cycling tour, my first thought is not, "How long is the tour?" or "Does it fit within prescribed touring definitions?" ... my first thought is ... "Where are you going?" ... and I don't care if you go there on a day tour, an overnight tour, a hub-and-spoke tour, a weekend tour, a week-long tour, a month-long tour or whatever. I'm just curious about places ... what did you see, what did you do, etc.


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Maybe a better "definition" of a tour (if we really want to define a tour) should not include anything about time and length, but rather that we went somewhere we don't usually/often go and saw or did something other than the usual things we see on our usual evening or weekend rides. So perhaps it's not a tour if you ride the same 25 km loop you do after work 3 days a week, but it might be a tour if you look at a map and decide to go visit that lake over there that you've only been to twice. Just an idea.