Messages

31

General Discussion / Re: The Southern tier. East to west.

« on: November 24, 2025, 08:58:23 pm »

There was one main reason I favored cycling interstate 10 west of San Antonio. 90 was a good ride. I did it before. You go through those little towns like del Rio and Marathon and then north to Van Horn. It is the chip seal on the road. I hated it. It was a constant vibration through the frame, my hands, arms, shoulders, where I sat. It was irritating. After a couple of doses of chip seal roads, I sought a remedy. The emergency lane of interstate 10 was it. So you go from cycling on a surface of chip seal to pedaling your wheels across a carpet of radial wires. I figured, the occasional annoyances and setbacks of punctures were to be preferred against the constant irritating annoyance of the vibrations. 90 goes from Jacksonville Florida to Van Horn Texas.

32

General Discussion / Re: The Southern tier. East to west.

« on: November 21, 2025, 08:06:26 pm »

Okay. Thank you. I will just have to wait and see how it goes. It is not like the old days. A lot of the strength is gone. The drive, the determination, the motivation, the will are not what they used to be.

33

General Discussion / The Southern tier. East to west.

« on: November 21, 2025, 06:50:14 pm »

At the age of 76, I am entertaining myself with the fantasy that I can pedal a fully loaded touring bicycle from southeast coastal Florida to San Diego, California, just one more time. I told somebody about this the other day. He asked if I were going alone or with someone. I told him the possibility of finding someone to do a trip like that with me is not absolute zero. It is so close to zero that you cannot tell the difference. I know when I begin this trip I will be on my own. The most likely outcome is I will begin, go a long distance, and then call it off and return. There is the possibility I will actually go all the way to the west coast.

34

General Discussion / Re: Florida criminalizes sleeping on public land.

« on: November 19, 2025, 07:26:28 pm »

October has come and gone. Here we are in November. So far as anyone can tell, the mass arrests did not happen. What they did was run them off. The law went into the wooded areas where people were camped. They gave them time to leave. The people camped in public areas alongside walks and under bridges were told to leave. I am not sure, but I think they returned. I know of some people who were told to leave their camp where it was and get out. They did and they went back. I think they were leaning more toward getting people off of the sidewalks. They also ran them out of the woods.

35

General Discussion / Re: How much water to carry?

« on: November 19, 2025, 07:21:24 pm »

The busy, highly trafficked, urban areas can become something of a shock. I remember cycling very long distances on interstates. There was not much for quite some distance.
 It was free cycling with no stop lights, no intersections, no insane furious traffic, no pedestrians, no strip malls. Just plain old cycling forward. Then you must exit for an alternate route. The exit channels you straight into the pits of hell. A city crowded, noisy, dangerous, smelly, stop lights, stop signs, intersections, cars pulled across the bike lane, no bike lane at all. You can feel the constriction when you go from a long free ride into an urban area.

36

General Discussion / Re: Why did you go coast-to-coast? Research for a book.

« on: November 19, 2025, 07:02:16 pm »

As far as I am concerned, and as was my experience, transcontinental bicycle touring has little or nothing to do with the destination. It is the journey. Everything begins and ends somewhere. The end is not the point. The beginning it and doing it are everything.

37

General Discussion / Re: Fears for the Future of Adventure Cycling

« on: November 19, 2025, 06:57:25 pm »

I cycled the Delmarva peninsula twice. One time going north to south. I stood out of sight of the guard shack and thumbed a ride to the other side of the bridge. That was 1994. One time was going south to north. We called ahead. They had an official vehicle, a truck. A driver. We loaded our stuff in the back and he drove us across for $25.00. That was 2004. I do not remember which routes. I just looked on a map, chose a line and followed it. The thing about long distance bicycle touring is this. There are so many factors and variables and tangibles that impinge on everyday life which we have been conditioned by the easy life to ignore. Everything in the environment becomes more significant and meaningful in different ways. The weather is one example. Oh so it's raining today? So what. If I want to go somewhere I will just drive there. No problem. Oh so there will be a strong wind today? Big deal. It means nothing to me. I have a car. No strong wind is going to set me back. That is leisurely thinking. If you travel across the continent by bicycle the weather, the rain, the wind, the bumps and cracks in the sidewalks all take on a different meaning. Before we did not even know they existed. Now they are determining factors in our lives. You can bicycle across America and have nice pleasant calm weather all the way. You can start out from the east coast and go west and run straight into the jaws of one nasty lethal storm after another.

I remember bicycling through west Germany in 1994. On a short length of bicycle trail along the Main river I saw more loaded fully loaded touring cyclists then in everyone and all of my bicycling tours around the United States. And I have bicycle extensively around the United States of America. I saw more doing that in a distance of a few miles then I had ever seen in all my cycling here by that time and since then all put together.

38

Gear Talk / Re: Gear cable breakage

« on: November 08, 2025, 09:47:09 pm »

In all my worldwide touring on a fully loaded bicycle, there was only one instance in which a cable broke and that was a brake cable. There was something wrong with the housing which cut into the cable. As far as a cable breaking no never. They will stretch and wear to the point that they can break, yes, but you should always change all cables when you start a new tour of any long distance. I got my cables at Walmart. No problem with carrying loads over the Alps, over the Rockies, over many different mountains and hills. Never had a problem with a brake cable breaking or a derailleur cable.

39

General Discussion / Re: How much water to carry?

« on: November 05, 2025, 03:31:33 am »

Many people seem to be interested in bicycling gravel roads and single tracks and mountain paths. That kind of cycling has never held an interest for me. I never considered doing it that way. All my touring, bicycle travel, stealth camping, moteling was over the road. Highways and byways. Interstates. The only time I took a dirt path was to walk the bike back into the woods to find a place to sleep for the night. Keeping in close proximity to food and water is a comfort zone. I intended to always stay in it.

40

General Discussion / Re: Why did you go coast-to-coast? Research for a book.

« on: November 02, 2025, 07:37:23 pm »

I answer it saying this. The impulses set forth in my life that led me to that particular course of action came very early in life. The story is real. I think it is too deep a subject to discuss on a forum such as this one and others. It is a deep personal issue with me. The original impulse came from where, I have no way of knowing. I remember some events. The boy my age who taught me that sometimes limitations are only in your mind. He taught me how to ride a bicycle. His name was Johnny Mann. That was in Stuart Florida in the 1950s. That was the first one I could remember.

Pedaling a bicycle, to me, at times seemed almost like a surreal fantasy.  It was wonderful until I started getting punctured tires. Getting patch kids and pumps and a new tubes was a big problem. The cycling dropped off. When I was very young, maybe eight or nine possibly, our Father drove the family to Mexico for the summer. We were there a while and returned it to Florida over the road. You've been there. Motels, gas stations, restaurants. After returning to Florida, for some odd reason, I had this compelling drive to ride a bicycle back to the west. The east was bad news. Government were as crooked as a corkscrew. The judge or the sheriff might have done something about it if you could catch them sober, which some of them often were not. I sensed this place, Stuart Florida, at a very early age.

Right across the street from our house, just off the shore of the St Lucie River, they found a woman drowned and dead. She was the mother of four children. I'm not sure they found her in that particular location. I did see the body there in that location. I was maybe 5 or 6 or 7. The tide might possibly have carried her farther down the river. I can say only from what I saw. There was underhanded treachery no doubt whatsoever. I thought it would be really cool even at a very early age to ride a bicycle back toward the west and to Texas. I really I thought Texas was great. Of course you have to consider those days, 1956-57-58, I had the cognitive development of a child 8 years old. Any compulsion or action in your life is the culmination of what they call multiple causation. There is no one simple explanation for why people behave the way they do.

The first transcontinental was from Key West, FL to San Diego, CA. I wanted to do it but was not motivated to do it alone.
Then, a woman I had met while bicycling through the U.K. in the summer of 1984 agreed to come here and do the journey with me. She flew here from England. We did the trip in 66 days in the winter of 1984-85. It was about 3600 miles.

41

Gear Talk / Re: Upgrade for my touring packing set up

« on: October 29, 2025, 01:25:44 am »

You can make your own panniers which are much lighter than some that I have seen on the market. You can take those dry bags they sell in Walmart in the camping section. The tough thick plastic ones that are reinforced.  Roll it down three times tight. Connect hooks securely below that you can connect to the rack. You need backing in there and stiffening and all that. But it is much lighter than your average pannier and it is just as watertight as an Ortlieb pannier. Much less expensive.

42

General Discussion / Re: How much water to carry?

« on: October 24, 2025, 12:00:06 am »

A steady sure unlimited supply of clean drinking water is taken for granted in the United States. A salubrious level of water in the body charges the internal organs for efficiency. It is very important to stay properly hydrated when bicycling all day for days and weeks. It is possible when traveling over the road long distance, even in the United States, to find yourself dehydrated with no immediate source of what is absolutely essential for life, water. It is not as though anyone will die from it. In an emergency you can always flag motorists and seek aid. The thing is you can be caught short on water with a significant distance between yourself and the next Oasis.

43

General Discussion / Re: Court rules license plate readers illegal.

« on: October 21, 2025, 12:43:01 pm »

In all of my extensive bicycle touring, police pulled me over only twice. The first time I was cycling on an interstate where another road I did not know existed ran next to it and parallel with it. It was at night. I had to dismount, lift all my stuff over a barbed wire fence, and use the other road. The second time was in North Florida. There was a 4-ft side lane. It was all chewed up for the laying in of more asphalt. It was jiggly and it sent vibrations through the bike and through my body. So I was bicycling to the left of the white line. They pulled up in back at me and asked me to stop. I explained to them that I could not use the roughened part of the road with a bicycle. Besides that, I had a legal right to be cycling where I was and the way I was doing it.

44

General Discussion / Re: How much water to carry?

« on: October 21, 2025, 12:30:33 pm »

The above-link is spam posted in several threads.

0

Why did somebody post spam here?

45

General Discussion / Re: Costs per day?

« on: October 02, 2025, 12:37:35 am »

In 2007 I did Oregon to Indiana 2226 miles in 22 days. I spent $8 per day. This consisted of one galon of milk one box of cereal per day and coffee at every McDonalds on the route. I lost between 22 and 33 pounds on the trip. It took about 3 months to regain the weight. I have found if I average 55 miles a day I do not lose any weight. I did not spend any money on parts.

What kind of cereal?  Where did you buy it?  Was this boxed wal mart cereal?