Good advice here in that many of the nicest touring bikes do not ride nearly as well unloaded as they do loaded as their frame geometry and tubes are optimized for loaded riding.
My touring bike is a Kuwahara Cascade that has a decent ride when it is unloaded but really shines when she's loaded down... I run 26 inch wheels as she's an expedition bike and we have gone places where you only see mountain bikers. At 145 pounds I am not going to break anything on this bike.
Arvon makes a nice front rack for his tourers (I need to get one of these) that puts the weight behind the front axle and with this you can easily ride no handed... the World Tour I posted is 1/6 made and this bike really feels like a road bike when it is unloaded and you forget that it has a 60 inch wheelbase until the road gets ugly and you realize you can't feel the bumps. with a long wheelbase the bike also climbs and accelerates really well as the rider weight sits between the axles and un-weights the rear wheel a good deal. It would be a sketchy bike to ride in the winter unless you rode with some added weight in the rear and my extracycle is the same way in that it likes to be loaded down.
He comes at this as an ex racer and guy who used to ride 16,000 miles a year that was mostly touring and has a professional background in engineering and machining... he started building bikes when he was in his 50's and is just about ready to celebrate his 76th birthday. He could still waste most of us on a ride and spins some insanely high gears.
He started making tandems when Serotta did and had been making his custom hubs for almost as long as Phil Wood and the longtail tourer stemmed from his experiences riding tandems solo and finding that what worked well here also worked well for a single rider bike.
The coolest model he offers is a convertible that is built with S&S couplers that comes with three rear sections... one is for tandem, one for a conventional shorter wheelbase, and one for a longtail tourer. He also makes a dual tandem with rear sections for children and a full size section for adults (and grown children).