I first became aware of bicycle touring in my pre-bike days during a roadtrip from Los Angeles to Vancouver. Occasionally we’d see these strange people in the most unlikely of places: the cliffs of Big Sur, in the redwoods in No. Cal, along the coast of Oregon. They seemed like a strange breed. What would possess someone to take 80lbs of gear on their bike and ride hundreds of miles?
A few years later, I picked up a book Miles from Nowhere by Barbara Savage, the quintessential bicycle touring journal. It is about a husband and wife, who decided to take a bike trip around the world. The kicker is, Barbara had never ridden more than 15 miles until the trip!
The book inspired me! At that point I was already getting into bike commuting and starting to get the hang of carrying stuff on bike. A few months pass and my girlfriend is commuting 5 days a week on bike and is warming up to the idea of going on a bike tour. A few more months pass (these things take time sometimes), and we’re on our first mini bike tour through wine country in Solvang, CA. After that first taste, we were hooked and did a longer tour this past summer down the coast of Oregon.
It was one of the most liberating and amazing experiences we ever had together. We felt like adventurers. It is one of the few ways of travel where the actual act of getting from A to B is part of the adventure. There you are, completely self-sufficient, an agent in your own life, puttering along stopping whenever you want to stop and exploring whatever you want to explore.
Anyway, try as I might, it really is hard to describe in just words. I was recently poking around the Internet looking up bike touring stuff when I stumbled upon this couples’ video journal of their tour! It’s really well done. Check out their YouTube Channel here. I’m embedding the 2nd video in their series of 10 (not a whole lot happens in episode 1).
The whole series is really worth checking out and I hope it will inspire some people that are already commuting to give touring a try, because touring really is just a long commute home 
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