Raymond Bridge

My bicycle touring is 95% of the armchair variety... at least I have done a few camping trips over the years. I do love reading about other people's adventures in books and on-line.

This book is quite comprehensive at a basic level. There is enough material here that practically everyone can learn at least a few new things and be reminded of a few more. A person new to bike touring would probably be overwhelmed by reading straight through, but the book is well organized so it would be easy to jump in and pull out what you might be looking for.

One game I have been playing lately, inspired by this book: while I am out riding, when my attention turns to my pedaling, I focus mostly on lifting my rear foot. The front foot goes down quite naturally! Bridge points out that numb spots on the soles of your feet can come from keeping too much weight on the rear foot, which of course is very inefficient too. I have platform pedals so I am not trying to pull the pedal up. But just by reducing the weight on that rear pedal, I can increase comfort and efficiency. Nice and simple!

There is quite a thorough discussion here about packing and shipping bikes, when you want to tour a place that is far from home. Since the rules are constantly changing, it's pointless to try to capture them, and Bridge doesn't. He merely sketches out the various facets of the puzzle, things to keep in mind.

I am trying to reduce the size of my library. The ideal way is to read what I have and then let go of the books when I am finished. But this book has a great resources section at the back, 44 pages of addresses real and virtual, where to get maps, etc. A lot of the resources were familiar to me, but then a lot of them were not.… (más)