My love affair with bike touring started in 2005 when my girlfriend and I load a bunch of camping gear onto our commuter bikes and set off for Seattle, by way of Whidbey Island. Here is the mongrel of a bike I was on at the time.
We decided to do a few more long weekend trips, either in Wa. or the SSC, before finally setting our sights south to Mexico. So in the summer of 2007, we embarked on a 3,300km journey. I was riding a Kona Hoss, towing a BOB Yak trailer. She was on a Kona Cindercone, which she still commutes on 5 days a week.
I loved that bike, and trailer, but when we decided to go tour in Europe for a month in 2011, wedding a lot of research and test ride sin order to buy the touring bikes that would last us forever. Steel is real dontcha know, and that is how wended up riding matching Kona Sutras from Amsterdam, NL toToulouse, FR.
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I distinctly remember, in the fall of 2007, asking my boss for 3 months off the following summer so that we could ride our bikes across Canada. My boss shook his head "No" and said tome, "Andrew, you will have lots of time to ride your bike when you retire. I can't give you that much time off, so you'll have to wait until then." Then there were a few times during our travels in France when we wondered if maybe we just wanted to ride bikes all the time. Fast forward to now..we have jobs that pay well enough, but our hunger to see the world while we are young enough to enjoy it by bicycle seems to have won out over sanity. We have decided to take my boss up in his advice and retire to ride around the world for 10 years and then re-settle back into daily life.
When we first started talking about our trip, it was something far off in the future, yet close enough to seem like a reality. No one came out and called us nuts, in fact most people seemed encouraging, the kind of encouragement you give to a 12 year old building a spaceship out of cardboard in your backyard.
It has quickly gained momentum in our own minds. What seems light years away quickly became years, maybe months, perhaps just days away. We kept secretly praying for a golden handshake at work that never came. So instead we opted for what we coined, "early retirement."
We aren't rich, we didn't inherit any money. Instead we are selling everything we own, our home and our possessions, and will pack what is left onto bicycles. Our condo went up for sale last week, when it sells we'll be that much closer to realizing our dream.
Here is the first draft of our planned route: