It really depends. My wife would say that I'm most interested in the ride and don't really care about anything else. She's most interested in bike touring as a means of transportation between two points of interest so I take her to Europe where villages are close together and we can choose to ride 20 miles or 60 miles depending in what we see.

From my point of view, though, it's a combination. There are days where I find a groove riding 18 or 20 mph with a full load and that's all the day is about. Usually i'm most interested in seeing the landscape, meeting people, seeing sites and staying in a nice town. The bike is a way to slow down enough to really begin to understand a region and its people. So it seems my wife and I are not so different that way. We just have different ideas of the distance we want to cover to make it happen.

Although I'd love to cross the US by bike, I'm worried that the large distances between towns and 'sites' would wear me down.

John