Originally Posted by
popscube
Thanks everybody. The tires are 700's. I won't be carrying more than 30 pounds of gear. I do quite a lot of backpacking and the focus has been on ultralight. I normally carry around 45 pounds, but that's 10 days of food and a days supply of water. Maybe, I can get it all on my sectuer. Even with gear weight, the bike would still have less than 200 pounds. Why then, when I see people traveling, their bikes look loaded?
Some people travel very lightly, some more heavily. If you can put your gear together into one pile so you can figure out weight and volume, that would give you an idea of if you could do it with a couple panniers or not. But make sure you save enough room for a couple days of groceries for when you stock up at a Safeway.
I have never used a trailer. Thus, I can't offer an opinion, but I have seen some people pull trailers on some skinny tire bikes without much difficulty. Pulling a trailer up the hills along Pacific Coast (many are 8 percent grade, some steeper), would mean you need low gearing.
I rode Astoria to San Fransisco in 2014, my observations of that are at this posting: During some of the software changes on this forum, some photos got deleted. Maybe there will be some useful information there, maybe not.
Southt to North Pacific Coast Highway Concerns