Originally Posted by staehpj1

Just another point of view for perspective...
For a cross country tour I am not sure you will find the benefits you expect. We rode a number of sections of bike trail on our xc tour.

Some were nice, most notably the ones in the area around Frisco and Breckenridge. I would go out of my way to ride them.

Many other places the roads were much nicer. The surface of the trails were poorly maintained in some cases. Some were broken up badly enough that we had to ride very slowly to avoid cracks and potholes that were bad enough to make us worry about bike damage.

In other cases there were smooth surfaces, but the paths were slow and a pain to ride due to many intersections or to general poor design. Well maybe not exactly poor design, maybe they were just designed for going much slower than we wanted to ride. If you are trying to get across the country in a limited time riding 6-10 mph doesn't cut it.

Also there were paths that were not paved. We found most of these while passable to be unpleasant and slow to ride on a touring bike with 32mm tires. The loose gravel was a PITA. If you run into soft conditions it might be even worse.

Bottom line, most of the time we preferred to avoid the paths in favor of the roads when given the choice. Obviously it depends on a lot of factors including preferred speed and bike choice, so YMMV, but I would suggest that crossing the country on bike paths just might not be the panacea that you might expect.