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Photo by Colt Fetters
A wonderful, refreshing bike trip with minimal hassle and maximum fun is available to you right now: the bike overnight.
With more than a third of the days in 2014 having already slipped by, it seems a good time to look back over the weekly postings at BikeOvernights.org and highlight a few favorites from various parts of the country and the world.
When I was asked to highlight my three or four favorite bike overnights from 2013, I figured it was going to be easy. After I began thinking about it, however, I decided it was going to be impossible. And so, here are eight of my favorites, but not my eight favorites. There are others I enjoyed just as much as these.
In my October 8 post, I mentioned that we have created an all-new edition of the guidebook Cycling the Great Divide: From Canada to Mexico on North America's Premier Long-Distance Mountain Bike Route. The new edition, 250 pages in length compared to 220 pages in the first edition, includes the 254-mile Canadian section.
In 2000, about two years after all the maps had been printed for the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, we published a guidebook with possibly the longest name ever for a book: Cycling the Great Divide: From Canada to Mexico on America's Premier Long-Distance Mountain Bike Route.
August 2013 was a month brimming with great stories over on BikeOvernights.org. Check it out!
These may be the slow-going days of summer, but they're bringing some lively stories to BikeOvernights.org. Take, for instance, The Covered Bridges of Sugar Creek, a story about Indiana by Alan Gossard, published on July 22.
Union Station is but one of many sites Julian Hadley visits on his tour of the Gateway City, titled St. Louis Solo On A Single Speed. He also pedaled past the Gateway Arch, Busch Stadium, Bob Cassilly's Cementland, Soulard Farmer's Market, Union Station, and more.
Since the last update here at the blog, we've run a story out of Idaho and one from Georgia, separated by a piece about joining Adventure Cycling Association.
"Bicycling Bliss in Oklahoma," submitted by Danna Korak and Jody Watson, posted on June 3. It's our first Bike Overnight visit to the Sooner State. A week later, on June 10, we posted our second-ever ride in Nevada, titled "Escaping the Bright Lights of Las Vegas."
We've had some great bike overnighting adventure stories published on BikeOvernights.org over the past few weeks. Here are a few of the highlights.
We've had a terrific array of tales told at BikeOvernights.org over the past few weeks.
When Adventure Cycling Membership Director Julie Huck (that's her above) asked me to compile a blog post about the all-time Top 5 Bike Overnights, my first thought was, "Oh, that'll be easy." After digging into it, however, I learned that it would be anything but easy.
This week's tale of bike-overnighting adventure is by Adventure Cycling's own Julie Huck, who started working at Bikecentennial in 1985 as the receptionist for the organization. Over the years, she moved to director of the Membership Department. In the hours away from the office, Julie is one of the driving forces of cycling in Adventure Cycling's hometown of Missoula, Montana. She founded Montana Dirt Girls, a women's mountain bike and hiking group, and she is an officer of Missoulians on Bicycles. "My goal is to inspire more people to ride, even if I have to do it one person at a time," Julie says.
This week's story comes from Heather Andrews, who spent what she calls "an amazing summer" interning for Adventure Cycling Association's publications department in 2011. Heather made a solo ride to Oregon's Champoeg State Park, and had a blast doing it.
Elle Steele Bustamante out of Sacramento, California, is the author of this week's fun-filled Bike Overnight. Titled Our First Ever Family Weekend of Wonderfulness, Elle wrote the story as her first step in documenting a year of living almost car-free by the family of four. (If they didn't have a year left on their Prius lease, she says, they would go totally car-free.)
This week's Bike Overnight story comes from Kent "Mountain Turtle" Peterson, who tells us about an amazing accommodation in western Washington where grown-ups get to act like kids (or squirrels?) and sleep in the trees. "In mid-June," writes Kent, "Christine and I spent our 'virtual weekend' (Wednesday and Thursday) on a few acres of land next to the Raging River at a wonderful place called TreeHouse Point. This place is not far from our home in Issaquah -- just over eight miles as the bikes roll, and almost all of those miles traverse paths designated for non-motorized travel."
"With an expectant wife, a long tour was out of the question. But a quick 20-mile overnighter seemed just the ticket -- out after Saturday morning chores and back by Sunday lunch. Plus, if anything unexpected happened, I could be home in about an hour." That's what urban geographer Byron Rushing (he specializes in bicycle and pedestrian planning) has to say in this week's Bike Overnight's piece.