Where do you start your tours?
 

I'm curious ...

Where do you start most of your tours? Do you start your tours from home? Or do you fly, drive, take a train or bus, or use some other method of transportion to get to the start of your tours? In other words, are your tours usually local, or are they far enough away to require alternate transportation to get there.

Machka,

I know you travel a lot to start your tours...but for me, I enjoy starting or ending at my house. Hard to describe, but rolling up to my doorstep after a long tour gives me a great feeling of accomplishment. Since I'm a "tree-hugger" kind of a guy :) , I like to brag that I only used my bike or Amtrak for the entire trip. Plus, I hate the hassle of flying with a bike.

Living in L.A. makes it easy, since we have the coast, mountains and desert close by. (...of course, I still dream of touring Asia and Europe.)

I hate travelling by any means that I am not doing the 'driving' and I especially hate packing up and shipping or checking my bikes, so all of my tours have started from home...and they usually end there too, sooner or later. I guess if I am ever going to tour outside of the US or Canada I might have to rethink my position. ;)

This is the question that I am pondering for my next ride. I prefer to fly out and ride home. Somehow it feels good to know that every pedal is closer to home. And that is the way that I did the southern tier.

Next year I am going to do the west half of the transam and then a route from Missouri to home in Florida. The more I look at the route, time involved, and the seasons, I am now considering beginning from Florida and heading northwest. I will be able to begin earlier in the year and ride the hottest sections earlier in the season. What I don't like about this option is the fact that at some point I will have to purchase an airline ticket which commits me to a specific day to be on the west coast to fly home. I much prefer to not be tied down to a fixed schedule like that.
Anyway, those are the considerations that I am looking at right now.

I use one-way rental cars to get me to the start of a tour and to get home. It's less expensive and less of a hassle than flying and I've ridden all over near home so I'm not interested in starting from my front door. National Car Rental is the easiest and cheapest to use for the rental, by the way. If you are willing to drive like a complete idiot (not fast, just long ;) ) you can even get home from very far away in one day which saves lots of money ;) And, yes, you can drive from Portland OR to Denver in less than 24 hours...about 15 minutes less...but it's still less than 24 hours.

Interesting, I'm the opposite, I like riding into the unkown.

Agree - but you don't have to purchase a ticket until the last minute. For the few hundred dollars you save for an advance ticket, you can buy yourself a lot of flexibility. There are a lot of one-week advance tix that aren't that expensive.

I like winging it. On my XC trip, I didn't have a return ticket, and ended up getting offered a ride back home.

Also, check websites like craisglist for rideshares, and i think there are car delivery services too (where you deliver someone else's car).

It's pretty easy to be flexible as long as you are not going super far away / international.

I have done one trip leaving out my front door, but usually travel to the start - air mostly, bus a couple of times (yuck), car once. For the returns, I have flown, gotten a one-way rental car, gotten a ride, and cycled home.

I miss touring!

I mostly start somewhere else--but there is a special thrill in wheeling out of the driveway and off into the unknown.

Not to mention the ease of turning around a half dozen times in the first 20 minutes to get something you forgot. :eek:

I've done some tours out-my-front-door and back; but i usually fly and ride back. I fly to the west coast and ride back east; have the wind and sun at my back during the meanest part of the day. I started my world tour by flying to Alaska.

roughstuff

I've ridden from my front door and flown back, I've flown both ways (hard to ride in France any other way when you live in California :D ), been driven to the start and ridden home (by a very circuitous route), and been driven to the start and from the end. As a practical matter, hwo I get to and from the tour route is secondary to where I want to go.

What distance do you have to pass for your ride to be classified as a tour? 200 miles, 300 miles? 2 days, 3 days, a week?

Overnight.

In otherwords ...

Day 1: ride whatever distance you want to ride
Night 1: stay overnight somewhere away from home (in a hotel, campground, whatever)
Day 2: ride whatever distance you want to ride (home, on to another hotel/campground/whatever)

Congratulations ... you've now done a tour! :D

Its just that most people around here talk about week long rides. No body brags about the 2 day trip they took.

Nobody??? Have a look:

http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=231518

I've started most of my tours from home, but its getting a kinda old because I usually head east out the same highway and I've cycled the first 200 miles over a dozen times now. I don't mind the ride as much as the more times I ride it the more paranoid I get about the traffic:mad: and the first highway can be a little hairy. But I'll continue to do it because I like to roll out my driveway and finish at the porch, anticipating the cold beer I left in the fridge:D .

But, I have driven to start sites and left my truck--works good on loops. I might try cyco's rent a car one way deal--smart.

Always start from home, even if it is to ride to the airport or train station, the journey starts at home and also ends there.

for tours i would like to start from home, but...
if i only ever started my tours from home i would never get very far i'm afraid.
plus you would be doing the same old roads for the umpteenth time
(especially since i'm using those roads for weekend trips etc. as well).

For my pacific coast trip I got a ride up to San Fran, then rode home. It was nice riding home because you didn't have to worry about making a plane or anything. We were feeling a little tired and split up a longish day into two days and it was no problem at all. The flexibility was nice to have.

There are only so many places you can ride to around here though so I'm sure future tours will start and end away from home.

I'm not sure I agree with the overnight requirement. I've always liked Ken Kifer's definition:
http://www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/touring/touring.htm

"A tour is a trip from one place to another, and touring also implies travel as a form of exploration. Touring cyclists, then, are people who wish to explore the world around them via bicycle. However, just as a tour does not have to explore remote areas to be enjoyable, the trip does not have to last more than a few hours to qualify. Usually, touring consists of riding out in the countryside for the purpose of enjoying Nature."

"A ride of a few miles on a quiet rural road in the evening or on the weekend can be considered a touring trip, if the focus is on enjoying the outdoors and the sights along the way."

For OUR purposes, a tour is an overnighter at least. Otherwise we'd have the roadie and MTB lot all over us in droves claiming they are touring cyclists! :D

Naaaah, "touring" is a dirty word to most of those poor, benighted folks.;)

Commuting - going to work.
Touring - cruising along with no particular place to go...

Touring implies for me that the trip itself is the point, not how fast or how far you went.

I agree with most of the definitions...:D
But to me:
Commuting - riding to and from work
Utility-grocery store, running errands, etc.
Ramble- get on the bike and just ride with no particular destination in mind, or perhaps a general destination but willing to get side tracked:p
Touring-at least one overnight

As far as starting tours...yes.;) I have started tours from my front door, I have flown 2500 miles to start a tour, I have had people drive and drop me off to start tours, I have taken a bus (never again) to start tours, I have rented one way cars to start tours, I have driven parked the car and done a circle tour. To me the best ones were the start at home ones and having some one drop me off.

Aaron:)

According to the Cycle Touring Club they tour anywhere from 35 miles, Sunday rides and midweek. and they have been around for 125 years.
Cycle Touring to me is a state of mind, like wahoonc's ramble, I call touring.

but I find the poll cannot be answered unless both boxes are ticked:-

I am somewhat confused as to the terminology now.

Some tours start ( definition ) from home ( definition ).

Some need alternative transport ( definition)

maybe the poll needs to be reworded in order for the question to be answered.

What information do you wish to gather from the poll?

It has over 280 views and yet only 32 votes, maybe others feel the same way.

just an opinion

george