Originally Posted by MinnMan

Sorry, but this suggests to me that you don't actually have any experience riding the kinds of roads we are talking about. They are not dirt roads, they are gravel. There are books written on the subject of maintaining well-engineered gravel roads, and there are indeed networks of thousands and thousands of miles of these maintained throughout the midwestern farm belt and elsewhere.

No, riding gravel is not horrible. It is hard though. Well, some people might find it horrible in the same way that others find climbing steep hills to be horrible.

And of course, some gravel is harder than others. You might be kind of shocked to read about the notorious flint gravel of the Dirty Kanza. Dirty Kanza started a decade ago with 34 riders, and now is limited to 2200 riders. And registration fills in a week.