My family was always a bicycling family when I was growing up, but it was always either day rides or utilitarian riding (paper route, grocery shopping, etc). I started backpacking when i was young, but it was 1976 before I got interested in bicycle touring.

That first interest was due to bikecentennial, but despite wanting to do the coast to coast thing in 1976, it just didn't happen. 31 years later I finally decided to ride that route, now called the Trans America. I wound up riding it with my daughter and one of her college room mates. I celebrated my 56th birthday on that ride, which was my first tour.

So my first tour was a coast to coast tour with no previous shakedown tours. For whatever reason I never took an interest in short tours and have never done a week end tour.

If you count hub and spoke tours as touring, which I don't, I have no idea when my first tour was since I have taken a bike along on trips many times throughout my life. To me touring means riding from place to place on a bike for multiple consecutive days staying at various different stops reached by bike. So I consider the times when I drove somewhere and did day rides to just be day riding despite it being in a location other than from home.