My First Bicycle Tour

Sam,

My hands hurt just looking at your bare handlebars. Are you saving weight by not using handlebar tape?

Not to worry, there's tape on there but it's white/silver in color so looks like bare bars.

Looks like great weather and a fab campsite. Hope you had a great time. Was the music good too?

Weather was beautiful, the view from the campsite pleasant and the music was delightful.

Great stuff. I did my one and only bike tour 26 years ago when I was 16. We toured Belgium and Holland, the two flattest countries in Europe. We came down the ferry ramp and then free-wheeled for two weeks :)) I used to love going round on my bike, it is so much more fun than being stuck in the car.

It looks like a nice setup. WIth the wheelbase so short, did you find that you had to put the panniers further back than you would on a dedicated touring or mountain bike? Was the ride squirrely at all?

My first real bike tour was a one month circumnavigation of the north island of Japan, Hokkaido, with my brother when I was 17. It is still one of the best bike tours I've ever taken, maybe because it was all so new. Isn't bike touring a fantastic way to see distances?

Ive wanted to do this for a long time. i have an old bianchi road bike with mostly original parts but it's in great shape. Looks like maybe you used a basic road bike as opposed to something designed specifically for touring. did you have to make any changes to the bike? were you pretty comfortable on this rig or would you suggest something else? I gotta try this real soon, maybe along the coast.

Looks like his rack and panniers sit a fair way back, with the panniers starting around the hub. I'd have no trouble myself with heel clip on the panniers in that situation, and I'm US9.5 shoe size. So that set up looks GREAT!

Great tour mate, keep it going :-)

This setup would be great with heel clearance, but with the panniers so far back the offset weight tends to pull away from the front end of the bike and often causes shimmying in the front wheel or for the front wheel to be somewhat light on the road, thus causing the squirreling. It might just be that Sam's bodyweight was sufficiently forward to balance that, but I don't see how with his seat weight adding to the rear weight. That's what I was asking. A short wheelbase like this is naturally going to make the handling more twitchy and to make it difficult to get enough heel clearance for panniers.

Sorry, yes I agree on the weight distribution. However it depends a lot on what his load is and where it is in those rear panniers. On a road bike with drop bars your weight is pretty frontward in any case. If he's only carrying say 7 or 8kg (UL load plus a couple of kg of food) in those rear panniers its not going to affect much. Shimmy is pretty dependent on the idiosyncracies of bike geometry, road conditions…

Looks like a good trip!

I'm just returning from a ride over the Sierra Nevada range, from SFO to Fallon, Nevada on the Western Express route in June. Great trip: weather, temps, people I met—all outstanding.

Rode my Surly Long Haul Trucker, self-supported using front and rear panniers. Great learnings about gear (kept shipping stuff home), as well as what it takes to climb 6000' in a day with a fully loaded touring bike.

Crossing over Carson Pass was worth all the effort. Check out AdventureCycling.org for maps and more info, or drop me a line. Also made a quick video slideshow of the trip on Vimeo:

Looks like a cool trip.

How do you find the Edelux?

I put this touring setup together using the road bike I already had along with some panniers I picked up cheap at the local bike swap. I found it to be less than ideal since the panniers had to ride way back on the rack. I did not have issues with my feet hitting them fortunately.

If I was to get into bicycle touring seriously I would procure a dedicated touring fame with long chainstays and sturdy rack bosses. I liked only having the two panniers and I estimate that with my camping style I could get by without having to use front panniers.

Great thinking regarding using two panniers versus four.

As much as my Surly Trucker setup is considered pretty ideal by normal standards, I've found that I have zero desire to hump that much weight again, ever, unless I absolutely had to. It's a fantastic build, and I'm thankful that the bike—and I—have the ability to move so much weight.

But the older (and wiser?) I get, the more I think about something like an El Mariachi Ti from Salsa. With frame bags and no racks. More offroad touring in a MUCH lighter setup…

And the eDelux: outstanding light, and even better when it's powered from the SON28 hub. Bright, reliable, and built for the long haul. I have two identical setups on my Trucker and Big Dummy, and everything came from Peter at http://www.peterwhitecycles.com

looks real good – you might want to put a rear fender on there – that will help keep your gear clean.

i bought a Surly Long Haul Trucker last fall to use for some touring and to cart around my 2 year old. he loves it! i'm heading out Columbus Day weekend for 200 miles on an out and back. using my backpacking gear and two rear paniers, i will be carrying about 10 pounds less than my son weighs. and the load won't jerk from side to side :)

the steel frame of the LHT is much nicer on long rides compared to my Cannondale road bike's aluminum frame. for me, steel is real when it comes to touring bikes. i would love it to be lighter, but i also want it to be bombproof (i'm 250#).

Dylan, awesome photos!

can you tell me about your bike setup? the handlebars look interesting.

Ah, bike touring. Love it. Two buddies and I, when stationed in Europe, used to take most of our leave all at once and tour a different country on our bikes, unsupported, for three weeks at a time. Saw northeastern France, East Germany, Ireland, Scotland and the south island of New Zealand that way. When I was transferred back to the States, we rode our bikes around Arizona for three weeks. A truly wonderful way to travel!

Life kept me away from touring for a decade, but I decided to celebrate turning 50 a couple of years ago with a short, 9-day bike jaunt around Vermont. I was on my bike, on an adventure, on my 50th. It was fabulous, and reminded me of why I enjoyed bike touring so much! Below pic is of us at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon back in '97. I'm in the middle with my Koga Miyata World Traveller!

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well done – good to hear about your first tour,

well done on getting out on a quickie bike tour SamH.

Setup looks fine and nice to see someone touring without panniers up front, no matter what the touring distance.

You can get by just fine with a steel framed mountain bike frame, no need for silly bike touring specific frame. Obviously every bike tourist loves their Surly Long Haul Trucker, but I've read a good report saying that the Surly Karate Monkey makes a great touring bike as well. Long enough chainstays, steel, and when you aren't touring, put a sweet fork and fat tires on there, and you've got your mtn bike. Although if you are doing your bike touring 'correctly', you already have fattish tires and front suspension because you go into the wildest (and roughest) areas that a road/bike will allow.

I need to make a post about my DIY dry bag setup for people with short chainstays….

Eric, please do post those dry bag infos because the bicycles I've been touring on have short chainstays and I don't have the cool grand to be dropping on any Surly products.

I'd love to see your dry bags, especially for the short chainstays.

There are so many ways to set up a bike….
I'm the opposite of those posting here in regards to touring bikes.
I did so much distance racing in the past (double centuries +) on a compact geometry road bike that getting on a steel frame with an upright position is torture for me…Why won't it go faster, I feel like I'm on a beach cruiser! It's just what I'm used to.

I swap my 23s for 28s, put on a handlebar bag, use a seatpost/clamp-on rack, wear a hydration pack for water, and pack UL/SUL.

Show me those bags, I'm curious. I've been thinking about making some really light ones that could drape over a seatpost rack, saddle style. As of now, I've just strapped a duffle-style bag to it.

@ Sam You can make a handle bar bag w/ or w/out dry bags and nylon straps. There you can attach you tent or sleep pad etc… Longish stuff. You can also use front pannier racks. Many cyclist prefer this method to rear panniers. There's also the large saddlebag behind the seat. Below are 2 links for bikeforums discussions on ultralight backpacking and Igor Kovse website. In the BF post check out a few of the cycles. Nun is leading the charge for UL biking.

http://tinyurl.com/2e55yac

http://www2.arnes.si/~ikovse/weight1.htm

Thanks Charlie, I've looked over Igor's page a number of times. And I do a fair bit of looking at the long distance mountain biking set-ups (one long under-seat bag and one handlebar bag).