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How About Bike Touring?
By Dwayne Price
Your bicycle can be more than a workout machine or beach cruiser. It can also be a
tour bus opening up the world in ways you may never have imagined. People have
been bicycle touring since the bicycle was invented and they keep doing it, young and
old, solo and groups, wanderers and schedulers, with friends, with children, with pets
even. Is it for you?
It’s early evening in the hiker/biker site at Veterans Memorial Park in Monterey. I am
sitting at a picnic table that’s loaded with food and cooking gear, and listening to a young
couple, he from France, she from the UK, as they talk about their ride down the Pacific
Coast and how they hope to get a job on a yacht out of Panama or Columbia heading
to Morocco. Across the table, another young Brit is nursing scrapes from a minor spill
earlier that day.
Welcome to the world of bicycle touring, where you meet interesting people, eat all you
want, see things in new ways, and find as much adventure as suits you. As you probably
already know, riding a bicycle exposes you to the world and intensifies the experience in
ways the insularity of an automobile will never enable: “Gee, I never knew that hill was
there!” “Now if I leave a little early, I can get a tailwind.” “Will that little dog still be sitting
by the steps when I go by this morning?” Traveling by bike will enrich your tourist
experience in the same ways.
It’s late morning as Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor train slows down to cross Suisun Bay.
My wife Nancy and I got up early this morning at the Lake Solano Campground so we
could enjoy our ride through Pleasants Valley to Suisun City, where we caught the train
to Richmond. Now we can relax, enjoy the ride and take in the scenery while our bikes sit
safely stowed in the racks that most of the Capitol Corridor cars have. We started this trip
two days earlier, taking the train in the opposite direction into Sacramento so we could
ride the American River Trail to Beal’s Point campground in Folsom, then head back down
through Sacramento and Davis to Lake Solano near Winters. In the reverse of that trip,
we will transfer to the Golden Gate Transit Route 40 bus to get over the Richmond/San
Rafael bridge and back home.
Bicycle touring doesn’t have to involve putting your bicycle in a box for shipment, getting
a passport, and flying all night so you can ride around Italy for two weeks—though
that would be a very nice trip that I would like to take someday. From Marin, you can go
for an overnighter, a couple of days, a week or more just by riding out your front door
and heading north, south, east or even west. By using the bicycle racks that virtually all
transit systems now have (thanks in part to advocates like our MCBC), you can extend
your trip and/or make it an easier ride. For instance, book a visit to the Pt. Reyes Hostel,
and hop onto the West Marin Stagecoach to Pt. Reyes
Station if you don’t want to ride the full distance. Or take
a few days to ride down the coast to San Luis Obispo
or Santa Barbara, then take Amtrak back to Emeryville
(the Coast Starlighter requires bikes to be boxed, but all
staffed stations have boxes for sale for $10).
It’s still early morning as my brother Joel and I roll our
bikes onto the Grafton/St. Charles automobile ferry. On our
left, the Mighty Mississippi heads on down to its meeting
with the Missouri River and the Gulf of Mexico. On our
right, somewhere amid the jumble of trees, water, and river
bank, the Illinois River has joined us. Straight ahead, a mile
or so away, is the state of Missouri. Joel and I have ridden
here from Jerseyville, the little Illinois town that we last
called home more than 40 years ago. We stayed with an
old friend from high school. Over the next few days we will
be sampling the Midwestern motel scene as we ride down
through a bit of the Ozarks, across southern Illinois, and
into Kentucky (via another ferry across the Ohio River) to
visit the village where we were born. But first, this gathering
of waters to cross: a mile-wide ditch constantly flowing
south, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It has to be seen
to be believed—and seen from our level to be really felt.
You see things from an automobile or bus, but you
feel them from the seat of a bicycle. On a drive through
Big Sur, the many pullouts and vista points offer amazing
photo ops. But when you’re riding a bicycle, you also
feel the sun, touch the fog, and become a continuous
spectator as the murmur of the surf slowly follows you
up and down. In the twelve years that my family lived
in Jerseyville, I’d never taken that ferry at Grafton; the
bridge at Alton was much more convenient for driving
to St. Louis. But a bicycle trip begs, even requires, that
things like ferry crossings be experienced. Touring by
bike, you will see things you never saw before—and
the things that you have seen before will be different.
It’s been almost an hour since we set out with full panniers
and empty stomachs. There has got to be an open
restaurant around here somewhere. Well, ask someone.
“Try over there around that building and down the stairs,”
he says. Yep, there it is and the menu posted out front has
BISCUITS AND GRAVY! They turn out to be big biscuits
with lots of gravy just the way I like it, and I can eat as much
as I want because I will be burning lots of calories for the
next six or seven hours.
Indulge! But instead of coming back from your trip
with a few extra pounds you will probably be cinching
in your belt a notch. Just make sure you don’t continue
the habit when you’re not getting places by bike.
It’s about midnight when another car rounds the bend
and briefly lights up my bivy, my air mattress, and my
pannier-laden bicycle. Not the best choice for a guerrilla
camp, but no one bothers me and I will be up and out at
dawn. Why am I here? Well, Golden Gate Transit got me
and my touring bicycle to Santa Rosa. Mendocino Transit
then took me to Willits before it headed west to the coast
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