Day trips and Cyclotouring?
 

I had posted a similar topic over in the General forum with some feedback.

Cyclotouring in the English and French traditions was the type of riding where you went out into the countryside loaded for the day, to ride and a comfortable pace and enjoy the scenery. I have tried using the search, and had no luck, somewhat better with google, but where does this type of riding easily fit into the bikeforums discussion catagories? The terrain includes road and mountain at times, and the rides are often non structured and shorter than 200k ruling out the long distance guys. The duration seems too short for the touring group, but this seems like the likely place to put it.

I would love to get longer tours into the picture, but at the curent phase in life I m lucky to get a whole day here and thare to hit the road.

Here is a link to one of my most recent ride reports:
http://oceanaircycles.com/2010/11/27...-mixed-metric/

The general idea fits the touring mindset of self sufficiency and adventure, hopefully I am in the right place.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5010/...2c01b356_z.jpg
Hi Mtn Road by rperks1, on Flickr

I would use any of the forums as you see fit.

BTW, your photo journal is great and worth the look.

Personally I don't think there is enough discussion about this form of touring here.

There are quite a few touring clubs, two of which I have been or am a member, and their bread-and-butter rides are day tours, not the extended, multi-week or multi-month treks that so many here seem enamoured with.


Day tours are en excellent way of building up experience in riding in varying conditions, understanding what the most important piece of equipment (the bicycle) will do, and building roadcraft.

The advice that Machka and I have given often to people with the "dream" is to get out and do day and overnight and weekend tours first before setting forth on the big one.

So yes, I think you have found the right place.

Scroll down to view two old time videos of day touring in England.

http://www.3speedtour.com/

Awesome video!

The OP touches on changing attitudes and definitions over the history of cycling. What was looked on as leisure cycling in the 19th century became more organised into touring clubs (many with left wing and utopian ideals) and then in the new world this later became known as adventure touring.

We live now in a more individualistic age so you can do what you want and call it what you want.

Anyone interested can look at my photos that show 'adventure cycling' is nothing new only the name has changed.

http://cid-ee2d580a9b948dff.photos.l...time%20002.jpg

I answered in the previous post in the General category.

But a day trip/tour is what I call a Ramble. I will grab my bike of choice for the day, load a few basic supplies based on the weather and head out for the day. I may have a destination in mind, or I may not. On more than one occasion I used the heads and tails method of choosing my route. I would come to a intersection or fork in the road; tossed the quarter, heads I went right, tails I went left. Found some interesting things that day.

FWIW I have 4-5 different bikes I will ramble on. Three are up right IGH, one is a drop bar touring bike, the other an expedition bike with butterfly bars. The only thing they have in common is fenders, racks, and lights.

Aaron :)

Sounds like a fun way to spend the day and very creative!

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by cyclotouring. From your blog it appears as if it's a day ride where you go out and explore some territory, and you don't mind riding on dirt and gravel as part of it. Is that close?

I've always included this kind of ride among my cycling activities. In college I rode my Raleigh Gran Prix on what I called "Exploring Rides." I'd head out away from home, come to an intersection, choose a direction at random, ride to the next intersection, choose a direction at random, etc. If I came to the same intersection on the next "exploring ride" I'd take the other turn. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,..." After a year or two I had pretty much explored the surrounding countryside and ridden every road. I never shied away from dirt and gravel; rather, if I saw a dirt road heading off into the woods I was more likely to choose that than not.

This was before mountain bikes took over in bike shops; it was the era of the 10-speed. It was also the poor-college-kid stage of my life where having one good bike was fortunate; having more than one was out of the question. Today I'd have to choose between two bikes for this kind of ride - my tourer or my mountain bike. (My road bike would be out of the running.) Due to my lack of choices I learned that it's very possible to ride a 10-speed with 27 x 1 1/4" tires off-road.

One nice benefit of these rides was that when I happened on a nice stretch of road I filed it in my brain for later. I discovered lots of great routes that I may otherwise never have ridden.

The ride on your blog is right in my neck of the woods. I live by Morro Bay. I've been on those roads.

I have a route for you that features a combination of on- and off-road, and is pretty spectacular, if you're interested. It's tough, for me anyway, and I use it as a test to see if I'm really in shape for an upcoming tour.

I start in Los Osos, take Los Osos Valley Road to Foothill, turn left and head into SLO. Wind your way to Monterey and head up the hill to Highway 101. Ride on the shoulder until you get to the underpass for Stagecoach Road. Take Stagecoach to the top of the grade (your first dirt road.) At the top, cross over to the shoulder of 101 again, heading east. Get off at the Santa Margarita exit. Take El Camino Real north, through Atascadero. When it ends, get back on 101 to Vineyard Drive. Get off, head west on Vineyard, about 1/4 mile to S. Bethel Road. Turn left on S. Bethel. It turns into Santa Rita Road, which is a beautiful ride, heading through bucolic farms and ranches. The pavement ends and you'll be on dirt up and over the top. It's awesome! Going down the other side is a fun descent. It finally turns into pavement a little distance before Old Creek Road. Turn left on Old Creek and ride into Cayucos. Turn left on Highway 1 and head back towards Los Osos. This circuit can be started and ended anywhere along the way.

Lots of Cyclocross bikes use 32mm/1.25in tires. After having ridden mountain bikes quite a bit, it was a bit startling to ride a "road" bike with relatively skinny wheels off road and especially during a race.

A recent, long thread over at CG delved into this very issue. What exactly constitutes a tour? As I recall, the general consensus was a tour consists of being away for at least 24hours. On this forum, at least for now, a tour is whatever you want it to be.

I often do a 'ramble.' Good word. Climb aboard on a nice day with a few supplies in a rack bag, and head out, always on my touring bike. The general goal is a 4 to 6 hour pedal and usually includes a good bit of hanging out somewhere interesting. I'm sure this is very common amongst us folks. Usually from home, but occasionally from a base camp. Great way to spend the day.

Here's the thread you're probably talking about:

http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/forum...read_id=156733

I started that discussion off questioning whether day trips from home were really "tours", but eventually came around to the viewpoint that the defining characteristic of a tour is some kind of "specialness" to the person doing it. So, if it's an everyday occurrence from your home base, like a commute or training ride, then that wouldn't really qualify as a tour for most people, I think. But even a day trip, if undertaken in a certain spirit (say, exploring a route near to home that you haven't done before, or stretching your abilities in some way, or even just going out the door with the mindset of this being a mini-tour), then who's to say that isn't a tour. Otherwise you start getting into silly arguments trying to define how much distance you have to cover before it's a tour, or how many nights, or whether staying in motels qualifies... and how about if you get a ride part of the way? And what if you're sagged? Or otherwise supported in some way? Or break down and have to abort and get picked up - was that a tour? There are a million variations on the theme, so I ended up trying to distill whatever it is that makes people intuitively say "this is a tour", and I think it just comes down to the person doing it calling it such. So if you say it's a tour, if you really believe that, then it's a tour.

Of course that opens up the field to abuse in the form of people being disingenuous, e.g. doing training rides from home and telling everybody "well, it's a tour if I say it is", but that's a different problem. I'm assuming good faith and honesty when self-defining, but the issue of what really constitutes a tour is a special problem that I have to deal with on crazyguyonabike when deciding what to allow there. As time goes on, and the site becomes more well known, then of course people want to put their journals there - even if what they are writing about may not really constitute a "bicycle tour" to most people. But I try to be very flexible, and I certainly have not been removing day trips from the site. In any case, I'll shortly be opening up a new topic under topicwise.com, probably called something like "Bicycle Life", to cater to people who want to talk about commuting, car-free living, training, or whatever else related to bicycles that isn't touring.

It's an interesting subject, trying to define exactly what "bicycle touring" is, but I think if you get too strict with the definitions then you will inevitably and needlessly marginalize people and create bad feelings.

Neil

Very interesting.

Will this be any different from BFs 'Commuting' ,'Living Car-Free' and 'Training & Nutrition'?

The topics on topicwise.com are exactly the same in terms of structure and features as crazyguyonabike - just different content. So there'll be journals, articles, forums, resources, classifieds etc. The purpose of the "Bicycle Life" topic would be to cover "everything else" about general cycling, so those three things you mentioned would definitely fit in there. I might create separate topics for racing (road and off-road) since that has a pretty well-defined and distinctive sub-culture, like bike touring.

Neil

Cyclotouring just means that you tour on a bicycle and not in a car, by foot or some other way. Obviously this discussion will end up in determining what "touring" really means. But the reality is that it means different thing to different people. I see pictures of bikes here that don't have racks or fenders (in my opinion both are necessary for a decent touring bike) and that in a thread called loaded touring. But I don't complain. I'm sure some people tour with a sag wagon/luggage transporter and stay in hotels. While others are totally self sufficient and won't even eat at a restaurant on the way. I'm somewhere in the middle depending on my mood and other factors.

The difference of my day rides and overnight tours aren't huge and even I started to get into a vague area where I stayed at a hotel as a base and did day tours. Looking at that it's not much different than touring from one hotel to another. Again I don't worry about that much.

So if you have a question about a bicycle and your bike matches more to a bike people tour on than a mountain, road racer, or city commuter then this forum is the right place for it. If you are inquiring about a touring route for a day then again this forum might be for you as every multi-day tour is composed of several day tours. If you want to find the true meaning of "touring", "adventure", and "self sufficiency" then you are again at the right place. Just for the latter one don't expect an actual answer. :)

BigBlueToe,
Thanks for the loop. I just put it down on Bikely and am looking forward to my next trip up to see the in-laws.

The thing I love about riding up by you, on the central coast, is that the dirt roads are still open, and many of the ranchers are actually friendly. Down here in Ventura, many of the roads shown on the maps are private and the ranchers will chase you off. Often of my rides are like yours, but hit dead ends or being escorted back off the property. I am still trying to figure out how it is that some ranchers consider roads with county mile markers private, but when they are bigger than you, have a truck and it is full of dogs, I usually just respect their wishes.

I think it's quite appropriate to refer to those rides as "tours". I do quite a few rides like that myself, and have often thought of them as "mini-tours", long before this thread appeared here (which reminds me that I need to start regularly updating my own cycling blog all over again). Like others in this thread, I've often advised people thinking of attempting a longer tour to first be comfortable with this style of touring, along with the over-nighters.

Most of my cycling has been 'day tour's. I want to take longer ones, but circumstances haven't allowed it yet. Even so, it's quite nice to pack a lunch and few snacks, plenty of water and head out from first of dawn until sometime around supper. No rush. No clamoring TV, no household chores. *blissful sigh*

Absolutely! The majority of my riding in the past year has been along the lines of what others are calling cyclotouring or day touring. There's nothing like wandering country roads, making a route as you go, and riding at a pace relaxed enough to take in and enjoy all the sights along the way. I stopped racing road because I could no longer bear to think of a ride as a "training" ride, and I'd started to forget how much fun it is to just simply pedal a bicycle.

Perhaps the definition of a day tour would include stopping for a meal or perhaps a picnic.

I like these, but I prefer the overnight tour... where you get to put up a tent, have a meal and maybe watch a few meteorites...

Actually, if I remember from my days of training as a tour guide, it has nothing to do with length or period, it has to do with different cultural or natural settings.

I am sure there are a lot of non-bicycle day-tour operators who would laugh at the idea that they really aren't tour operators because they don't spend overnight somewhere.