Originally Posted by
staehpj1
Additionally, I will add that short tours don't give you a real feel for what a long tour is like anyway. Personally, if I had tried short tours first I might have never done a long one. It turns out that while I like long tours, I find short ones especially those close to home about as exciting as camping in the back yard. Some people may like short tours, some may like long tours, and some may like both, but liking one is no guarantee of liking the other.
Perhaps I should clarify that by 'short' I mean: 3-7 nights away from home. In my buddy's case, a 3- to 5-night tour would probably have been enough for him to realize that he didn't like the hassle of camping after a hard day of riding, that there was a lot of relatively boring riding to accomplish on many days, and that he didn't have nearly as much human interaction riding and sitting alone in his tent as he did managing a group of 8 people in a busy office.
If he'd been prepared for at least some of these realities, I think he probably would have gotten much further than he did. I didn't know anything about bike touring when he was planning for the trip, but in talking with him before he left his expectations seemed a bit out of whack. I think he envisioned that each day would be easy pedaling past Yosemite-like natural wonders, camp would take 5-10 minutes to setup, he'd have clean laundry and hot showers on a daily basis, and meet dozens of interesting characters every day.