To comment on several things above--
I have the same frame (the first one Lance won the Tour de France on), and I am quite comfortable riding it all day. We've done countless day rides of 100-155 miles on our racing Treks.
Mine came with a 30-42-52 triple and I have a 12-26 cassette on it, so my low gear is about 31". I virtually never use that smallest ring, but when I need it, I'm sure glad it's there. We have a 24/34 (19") low gear on our road tandem because my wife is such a poor climber. If worn-out bearings and chainrings and the desire to tour ever make you want to change your crankset, go for the external-bearing type. External bearings last much longer because there's room for more and bigger ball bearings in them, and the side-to-side torque does not have nearly as much leverage on them because the left-side and right-side bearings are farther apart. (The Q, or pedal stance, is no wider though.) The crankset is so quick to install and remove on these that it's almost worth removing it every time you want to clean that area of the frame. Mine has a single 8mm allen bolt and doesn't require a crank puller or any special tools-- just one allen wrench with suitable leverage, either a long handle or a cheater bar. Since the spindle is part of the right crank arm, you'll automatically have the right length if you frequently change the cranks out for different kinds of rides.
I and our younger son were going to ride down the California coast this summer but he broke his collar bone (as mentioned in my post above) completely in two, 10 days before the planned date. (He's back on the bike now, but since he's in school, we'll have to wait for next summer to try again.) Our plan was to take only what we would need for staying in hotels, and keep good aerodynamics so we can go fast and have fun. We made a list of everything we'd need and got it together and put it in my Jandd Mountaineering Mountain Wedge III seat bag which I got as an experiment. It fit just fine, so I bought another one for him. This seat bag has about 450 cubic inches. I was pleasantly surprised how well behaved it was back there with the straps that go down to the chain stays. I have a seatpost-clamp rack too, but have never used it, and we found we would not need racks for this ride. We did many solo centuries with this bag loaded up with extra stuff we didn't need, just to try it out before the tour. Here's the setup:
(and yes I know the seat post is on backwards. This made attaching the bag just slighty more of a challenge with the XLab Saddlewing carrier there for two additional water bottles, but I like to sit farther forward relative to the pedals. I'm not comfortable sitting as far back as most people do. Both of our sons are the same way.)
If you want more room, there are seat bags that have nearly a cubic foot, like the Carradice Camper Longflap at 32x24x32cm or the Carradice Super C at 48x28x17cm, both seen at
http://www.wallbike.com/carradice/camper.html . Another good page on them is at
http://www.peterwhitecycles.com/carradice.asp . Metal stabilizers keep them from swinging around back there, or dragging on the tire.
