Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site l5.uucp Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!petrus!bellcore!decvax!ucbvax!ucdavis!lll-crg!well!l5!gnu From: gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) Newsgroups: net.cycle Subject: Re: Cross Country Ride Info Message-ID: <195@l5.uucp> Date: Tue, 15-Oct-85 03:09:29 EDT Article-I.D.: l5.195 Posted: Tue Oct 15 03:09:29 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 17-Oct-85 01:36:11 EDT References: <11100004@uiucuxc.UUCP> <28300037@ISM780.UUCP> Organization: Ell-Five [Consultants], San Francisco Lines: 72 Summary: Small bikes work, it depends what you want. My first long-distance cycle trip was 8000 miles in three months on a 1976 Honda 360. This proved to be a very enjoyable trip, down the Blue Ridge Parkway, thru the South, Florida, along the Gulf and across Texas, up the middle of New Mexico, Colorado, then back across Kansas and east all the way back to DC where I'd started. For almost all of the trip I was alone, and for that kind of slow, one-person trip, a small bike is great. One of the worst things you can do to a good cycle trip is to TRY to make 400 miles in a day. Why bother? Are you out there to eat miles, or to have a good time? You'll see a lot more interesting things at 50 than you will at 80, and you'll have time to stop and take a closer look before they're too far behind you to bother. With a 10-minute break every hour or so, at a nice place I'd spot along the road, I had a very enjoyable trip. Anytime I felt like taking a side road, I just did. I took bread and cheese and water and juice and fruit, which was great to have when I passed a nice shady forest meadow and felt hungry. Once in a while I cooked a chunky soup over a campfire, or stole a few ears of corn from a field and cooked them within an hour in the coals. I found that the best spots to camp were just places where you could pull off the road and nobody could spot you. Check dirt roads leading behind farmers' fields, levee roads or access roads by a creek or river, fire roads, or whatever. Make sure the bike is not visible from anywhere on paved road. The cardinal rule is to leave the place looking *exactly* like you found it, which meant usually just spreading a tarp and sleeping bag under the stars, undisturbed by the rest of humanity. No fires unless I found a firepit. I NEVER had any property owners object to this mode of camping; I even had a cop come up the fire road one day (I heard him coming so I wasn't naked in the sleeping bag when he got there) and we talked for a few minutes and he went on his way. After this kind of peace and solitude, I find the typical car camp a sad place, to say nothing of the typical RV camp. Let me second the idea that you MUST carry raingear. The $30 rainsuits made of cheap vinyl are fine for a few months of touring; eventually they get holes or tears or melted and need replacing, but $10/month to be able to ride all day in rain without getting wet is c-h-e-a-p! Bring layerable clothes -- t-shirts, flannel shirts, sweaters, windbreakers, long underwear and jeans, and maybe short pants for when you aren't riding. Also big wool socks as well as normal ones. In Colorado I had all this on at once, plus the raingear, just to keep from freezing. If you can carry one extra set of pants & shirt, you can wash all the rest at laundromats. Be sure to buy your bike soon enough that you can break it in riding around town (say ~1000 miles) where you won't be riding it hard. Also, you can get the breakin service done at your original dealer, and get used to riding the bike and dealing with any problems it has. Buy spare cables and bulbs and fuses and find ingenious hideyholes in the bike where you can stash them so they'll be there in the dark in the middle of the cornfield in Kansas when you need them. And on a trip like this, do maintenance every day. At my first gas stop of the day, I would check the oil, grease the chain (vaseline is harder to put on than the spray on stuff, but it works very well and is very cheap), adjust its tension, and check all the nuts and bolts and lights. Doing it that often, it got to be a 10 minute job. A tank pack, with a clear plastic top you can put a map behind, is a good thing to have; as well as a pair of saddlebags (mine were vinyl, which meant they would stretch if I needed to stuff a little more in some days). This gear should be waterproof, or you should line it with plastic to make it that way. (I put plywood on the bottom of the saddlebags to keep the hot exhaust pipes from burning them, too.) I've done two more long distance trips (11K miles and 20K miles) and the largest bike I used was a Honda 400. I carried a passenger and her gear for a few hundred miles of it, too. You don't need a big expensive bike to tour!