Pedalshift Tour Journals

As the US shivers through the polar vortex, let's talk about prep for next week's cross Florida bike tour! Details on the route, the gear, the flying, the meetup in Orlando and much more. Warm up to the first Pedalshift tour of 2019! Housekeeping XFL Tour: I'll be rolling my own route across central Florida from Tampa on the gulf coast to Cocoa Beach on the east. Preview episode drops in two weeks! Podcast sponsor slots are available starting in the new year... check out pedalshift.net/sponsor for more info. Meetups & Live Shows XFL Orlando meetup Saturday 2/9, time TBA - pedalshift.net/orlando. Pedalshift LIVE Friday February 22 at 9pm ET! It will be the wrap up show for the XFL tour... takeways and a whole lot more. We'll do another AMA session too, so send me your bike touring or non-bike touring questions to pedalshift@pedalshift.net or come and ask in the chat box the night of.   Five Stars followup Andy from Orange still listens!   Hi Tim, thanks for the

A new year and a new beginners series! On the 150th edition of the Pedalshift Project, we kick off the Bicycle Touring Beginners Series by meeting this year's cyclist and road map some of the topics we'll cover as we check in over the next several months. Plus, updates on meetups and the Pedalshift Project is number one... where? Housekeeping XFL Tour: I'll be rolling my own route across central Florida from Tampa on the gulf coast to Cocoa Beach on the east. Preview episode drops in two weeks! Podcast sponsor slots are available starting in the new year... check out pedalshift.net/sponsor for more info. Meetups & Live Shows Miles of Portraits touring the US - join us at the DC REI on 1/24, 6:30-8:30pm, followed immediately by a meetup at Wunder Garten. XFL Orlando meetup Saturday 2/9, time TBA - pedalshift.net/orlando. Pedalshift LIVE Friday February 22 at 9pm ET! It will be the wrap up show for the XFL tour... takeways and a whole lot more. We'll do another AMA session

The Great Allegheny Passage 2019... What's in store for the trail? Allegheny Trail Alliance's Doug Riegner returns to the pod with the full scoop on the GAP! Housekeeping XFL Tour: I'll be rolling my own route across central Florida from Tampa on the gulf coast to Cocoa Beach on the east. Preview episode drops in two weeks! Podcast sponsor slots are available starting in the new year... check out pedalshift.net/sponsor for more info. Meetups & Live Shows Miles of Portraits touring the US - join us for the two DC area events where I'll be MCing and helping out the Q&A... Tyson's REI on 1/22, 6:30-8:30pm  DC REI on 1/24, 6:30-8:30pm, followed immediately by a meetup at Wunder Garten. XFL Orlando meetup Saturday 2/9, time TBA - pedalshift.net/orlando. Pedalshift LIVE Friday February 22 at 9pm ET! It will be the wrap up show for the XFL tour... takeways and a whole lot more. We'll do another AMA session too, so send me your bike touring or non-bike touring questions

It doesn't take more than a few listens to the Pedalshift Project to know I pine for the state of Oregon... pretty much on a daily basis. You always hear about people who move to Oregon... well, I was the damn fool that moved away. That's why I try to get back as often as I can, and when I do I try to get myself and a bike out to the coast and soak in a few days or more of bicycling and camping down the Oregon coast. There are few places with a better reputation for bicycle touring, and fewer still that measure up to the hype. In the summer of 2016 I was a grizzled veteran of Oregon coast bicycle touring. I'd done it as a part of the full Pacific Coast in 2014 plus as a part of two trips to San Francisco the year before and after. But this time, I didn't have the time to do the whole thing. Sure I could have banged out miles but this time I wanted to go slow and savor the central part of the coast... Tillamook, Pacific City, Newport... places I think about when I'm dreaming up other tours. Places that I com

In the spring of 2016 I revisited one of my favorite routes that just so happens to begin practically in my backyard… the C&O Canal. From Cumberland to Washington, it’s 184.5 miles of adventure. It just didn’t exactly go according to plan… Download the rest at pedalshift.net/plus.

In the spring of 2016 I tackled one of my favorite, challenging stretches of the California coast on a Brompton folding bike. Follow along from Half Moon Bay, through Santa Cruz, Monterey, Big Sur, Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo on the adventure! Can a loaded folding bike handle the hills of Big Sur? What kind of curveballs will this tour throw at me to overcome? It’s all in Pedalshift Tour Journals Vol. 5: California Coast! Learn more and get this journal and more at http://pedalshift.net/plus.

The US Pacific Coast bike tour is one of the premiere extended bike tours in the world. Amenities mixed with temperate weather and solid challenges make for a trip of a lifetime. Learn more and get this journal and more at pedalshift.net/plus. My trip was a modified version of the traditional Pacific Coast bike tour… instead of starting in Vancouver, BC my tour began in earnest in Victoria, BC. To be precise, I started in Seattle and took a ferry from there to Victoria, and continued north to Sydney, BC before making the turn south. I rode every inch to the US/Mexico border except for a short stretch from Anaheim to Oceanside (largely to try the Amtrak Surfliner). As I reflect back on the trip, I realize how much of it I retain in my memory. Some of the portions of the route were well-known (the Oregon coast, Leggett Hill, San Francisco) and some were brand new bicycling experiences (Washington state, Big Sur, Los Angeles). What amazes me is the detailed knowledge I retain of small stretches of the ride. T

I grew up within a stone’s throw of the Erie Canal in Fairport, NY. It’s a quaint town outside Rochester, NY. Back in the early 1800s, the canal was a major economic powerhouse that fueled the growth of western and central New York. Learn more and get this journal and more at pedalshift.net/plus. By the time I was around, it was little more than a watery green line that we were dared to swim in… fodder for elementary school field trips… and the towpath was a scary place where people were reportedly mugged all the time. I always thought that was a parental fabrication to stop us from swimming in the muck, but my crime data from the 1980s is a sadly incomplete. Despite the warnings, the canal path was a ticket to adventure. As a kid you knew you could ride out as far as you wanted and only needed to turn 180 degrees and you’d be back in the familiar streets. Permanent breadcrumbs, if you will. So I was able to ride my Huffy to exotic places like Pittsford and Bushnells Basin. Only a few miles away by map sta

The Chesapeake and Ohio National Historic Park towpath stretches from Washington, DC to Cumberland , MD. From there the Great Allegheny Passage connects Cumberland to Pittsburgh, PA. That’s about 330 miles of contiguous, car free bicycle touring paradise. And it was cursed. Well, at least for me. I’ve ridden the C&O multiple times, since it’s southern terminus is practically in my backyard. And I’d ridden the GAP up from Cumberland to the summit of the Eastern continental divide… but I never had time to continue on. And Pittsburgh alway beckoned… like a siren. But we all know what happens to sailors who follow the call of the sirens, right? Learn more and get this journal and more at pedalshift.net/plus. In 2014 I finally had a chance to through-ride the GAP and C&O, choosing to start in Pittsburgh and bike home. That failed pretty spectacularly, with a tire blowout and some pretty fierce tendonitis. You can read more about that trip over at pedalshift.net (just search GAP and follow the aroma of failure

When I moved back east from Portland to Washington, DC something caught my eye. I forgot how close everything was in the northeast. On the west coast you can go hours between major cities… but on the east coast they feel like they overlap. And they kind of do. The Bo-Wash corridor is an old term for the nearly constant urban strip that stretches from Boston in the north through New England, New York City, Philadelphia and down to the nation’s capital. It’s Amtrak’s most important route because a train can usually get you from DC to NYC’s city centers faster than you can wait out TSA and get from suburban airports to where you really want to go. Learn more and get this journal and more at pedalshift.net/plus. But it was the transit systems that had my attention. If the outer reaches of each city’s transit systems overlapped just enough… couldn’t you take local or regional busses and trains all the way? The answer is: yes. And I did it in the summer of 2015. It’s neither the fastest, nor the cheapest, not t