Have any close-calls with vehicles? My better-half wants to ride cross-country (you know, the old "dip your rear wheel in the Pacific, then dip the front in the Atlantic at the end of the adventure"). We enjoy biking, but I am borderline paranoid of vehicular kamikazes.
On this thread over the next week or so I'll post pics relevant to purple martins and relate it to the journey.
But this seems a question of immediate import so I'll address it now. I worked up to this trip by commuting to my school on my bike, said bike loaded with fifty pounds in the luggage to simulate a touring weight.
What must be understood is that on a bike everything is relative to the gearing. I was running a road bike with mountain bike (ie. low) gears. Human legs work best with low effort/high spin rate pedaling (look at the guys on the Tour de France for example), most novices on the other hand tend towards high effort/low spin rate riding, this is a mistake.
You want gears low enough where you can spin the pedals at a high rate at rolling speeds as low as 5 mph. If you look at that photo (taken on the Delaware Water Gap just ten miles from my destination on the last day) you may note just how low a gear I am in after climbing to that point.
The year prior to this I rode my bike around 20 miles per day round trip to work; two hours of gentle riding, five days a week. In the months before the trip I also put in two 100-mile days. What must be understood is that those 100 miles were not
"Oh-geeze-I-have-to-ride-100-miles" days, if that were the case I'd have never finished. Instead what they were was long days pedaling easily along at no particular rate of speed.
That was the philosophy I brung on the whole trip, and it worked.
As far as safety and cars, I did indeed ride some busy roads, with no shoulder for significant stretches.
This is the mindset I applied to that....
IF I GET RUN OVER IT IS ALWAYS MY FAULT.
I don't care WHAT the law says, I was operating a slow-moving vehicle on or immediately adjacent to roadways carrying traffic travelling at normal motor vehicle speeds. I would lose any collision, big time, regardless of who was legally at fault.
I had two mirrors on the handlebars and used them constantly. Rolling along at only 10 mph or so made this task much easier. If there was any doubt at all I got off of the road surface and onto the roadside grass, stopping if necessary. One seventeen mile stretch along an overcrowded, narrow two lane highway between Anna and Vienna IL took me nearly four hours to traverse due to all the speeding tractor-trailers.
Later on the trip, I left Greenville OH around noontime after the passage of a strong weather front and, pushed by a steady 20mph tailwind, made 96 miles by dark. I was hoping to reach Delaware OH for a 100+ mile day just to say I had done it but when darkness fell I could no longer accurately judge the position of cars coming up from behind so I stopped for the night, just four miles short of 100, but I judged it too dangerous to proceed.
Mike
