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A few years back I met a friend who lives in Berlin and we spent a week biking to Copenhagen. It turns out we had compatible cycle touring styles, and said “let’s do this again some time… especially if I’m ever somewhere in Europe within a reasonable take-your-bike-on-the-train distance from Germany". Other vacation plans brought me to Slovenia, so we schemed up a week of self-supported cycling in Slovenia and a bit of Croatia, on a mix of paved and gravel roads. ...

Test post, to see if I can reshare a writeup I did on Strava to here (to share daily notes+photos with a few friends who don’t use strava or social media, during a week of cycling I’m doing in Slovenia): [Edit:] Unfortunately, I can only easily reshare a single summary photo from Strava, but ride notes and additional photos don’t carry over. I’ll probably keep using Strava as my place to quickly share a few notes + photos with fellow riders during a tour, but intend to come back here to write up longer recaps on the most interesting rides (see for example the Taiwan writeup below).

(this is a short recap post with some photos, perhaps some day I’ll come back and write more when I have the space to fully wrap my head around what just happened) Ever since I first visited Japan, one of my dreams has been to do a long-distance bicycle tour there, with a focus on rural areas (as well as the food, history, craftsmanship, and culture). “Some day, life’s too busy… maybe when I’m 65…”– but after a career change, I made it happen this year. It was one of the most memorable trips of my life. ...

(This is a placeholder writeup with a few photos, perhaps I’ll come back some day and flesh it out…) I spent a week cycling the length of Korea (~400 miles from Seoul to Busan), as a fully supported** ride with an organized tour group and about 20 strangers (though a few I’d met on a bike tour in Vietnam the previous year). By the end I felt exhilarated, challenged, stimulated, and full of great food. ...

I’d heard over the years that Taiwan’s East Coast is beautiful and a popular place to cycle, and that you can rent bikes at one Giant store and return them at another, making a one way rental bike tour reasonable. I’d never quite found the excuse + motivation to plan a trip there, so had that filed away in the “some day” mental list. Then a few months ago a friend reached out saying he wanted to bike in Taiwan and would I be interested? I said yes, and before I knew it we were riding twisty roads down gorgeous Taroko gorge after gorging on breakfast dumplings… ...

Sewed a custom frame bag in a weekend workshop at Swift Industries up in Seattle. An impractically-small one, for the partial triangle on one of my bikes. Hey, I think it looks nice, and it can hold a pump, snacks, money, keys, and a light jacket… ...

Last summer (2022) I biked from ~Berlin to Copenhagen with a friend. A week of gorgeous riding on pavement and some dirt, carrying all our gear but staying in hotels to avoid the need for camping equipment, through a mix of rural landscapes, quaint towns, and cities. It started with flying into Berlin, checking my boxed bike and a lightweight duffel bag that just held two panniers of gear. I reassembled the bike in a train station in the city, hooked my panniers onto it, wadded up the duffel bag in the bottom of one of the panniers, and rode away… ...

I’m not as young as I used to be. Stretching before and after a long ride (especially on tours where I’m riding day after day after day) makes an especially big difference now. Notes to self: Here’s the ideal set of stretches I’ve settled on, with the (*) ones being the ones I prioritize if I’m feeling tight on time: Child’s pose * Cat Cow Down Dog Pec stretch doorway * Eagle Arms Clasp hands behind back Arm circles * Hip flexor (heel held to butt, knee pointing down)

(a brief recap, perhaps to come back to with more detail some day) I’ve wanted to push myself farther out of my bike touring comfort zone, in terms of traveling in a culture very different from home, and for long enough and at a slow enough pace that I start to pick up on the rhythms on daily life. I dove in to a four-week tour through Vietnam and Cambodia… ...

For years I’ve daydreamed about biking from DC to Pittsburgh on mostly car-free dirt trails, on a ~330 mile winding route that combines the C&O Canal Trail (a dirt trail formerly used by mules to pull cargo barges along the C&O canal in the 1800s, a transportation method that eventually lost to the railroad, and was nearly converted to roads before being preserved as a park in the 1970s) and the Great Allegheny Passage (a combination of rail trails integrated and completed in 2013). ...