Did someone say bicycle?

Something to think about before you buy a candy bar, a reason or two to build a drone, and ZTC goes for a bike ride...

Speaking of bikes... ZTC makes a good point that folks on boats are either a bike person or a non-bike person. My experience with folks on boats who have been successful with bikes aboard are folks who rode bikes before they had a boat, so riding is already something that comes natural.

On the other hand, folks who buy bikes with the intention of getting into it without any prior experience are much more likely to be selling theirs sooner or later when the fact that they don't get used, rust, and take up space gets to be an issue.

It's just how it seems to work...

While we were in the Med our bikes got used all the time for shopping, making water runs, and exploring. Take my word for it nothing quite improves the ability to explore an area as having a means of getting to (and back from) anywhere in a fifty-mile radius with the added perk of being able to bring back the shopping as a day trip. Not to mention the advantage of the fact that in Europe trains are bike friendly so it is easy to bike to a train station, take a train (with your bike) to an area a hundred miles or so inland and then when you're there you have your bike to explore to your heart's content. Once you're ready to go back to the boat, your train will whisk you and your bikes back to your starting point...

Can you spell c-i-v-i-l-i-z-e-d?

As I've mentioned before here on the blog, I'm not generally big on bikes that come in substandard sizing or fold up but then again I'm 6'5" and think Sundays were made for the sole purpose of doing double centuries so I'm pretty much your full sized bike kind a guy... That said, Russ and Laura (currently touring New Zealand) make a compelling case for small wheel bikes that fold on their excellent blog The Path Less Pedaled!

Another excellent site on bikes and touring you might want to check out is here. They make a great case for touring on cheap (but good) thrift store bikes... What can I say, they are obviously my kind of folks and, for the record, reading them has made me rethink the new bikes for "So It Goes" in a big way... But, more about that later!

Listening to Mr Big

So it goes...