We focus on bicycle riding during Florida's cooler months, mid-September through mid-April. We enjoy bike touring. If we are touring independently, tours are planned to begin and end at our home. Mostly this involves packing our gear on our bicycles and pedalling away with a route planned to bring us back to our home in a week to ten days. We are lucky to live near (20 miles) from an Amtrak station where the train can take us places, then we can pedal home. There are also the classic cross-state supported tours (like BRAG in Georgia) and a slew of multi-day tours which have the advantage of letting riders stay in a fixed place and ride loop routes in the area.
We have different bikes for different types of touring. We have folding Bike Friday Llamas for touring that will include a train or a ferry. We have folding urban bikes for casual trips (by car) to Florida cities. We do most of our independent touring on hard tail mountain bikes. (They are slow even with pavement tires, but they go anywhere on any surface. We once had a memorable 10 miles on a backroad that was supposed to be hard-packed sand but in reality varied from hard-packed washboard to loose sand. They are the trusty little pack ponies of our bike stable.) For supported touring we use our regular road bikes.
This year we will be doing touring events. Part of the decision to do touring events rather than independent touring is the our new road bikes. They are fabulous road bikes, but not designed to carry luggage. Since I really, really want to ride them alot, we'll do events this year and save the independent touring to next year when the excitement of the new road bikes has toned down. We are planning doing one or two events per month. This will give us plenty of time to ride in our local area. This also is a good schedule for our cat, Lucy, who can stay at home in our absence rather than face the prospect of days in a cage with strangers while we are gone having fun.
We initially prepare for touring with regular 30-mile rides locally. We have a few restaurants 20-25 miles from home that make convenient destinations for longer rides. The hardest thing to train for is hills. We have several nice grades, one fairly steep if short, within 10 miles of home. We used to live in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and these are little baby hills compared to those climbs. But it is all we have. Luckily since Florida "mountains" are often bridges and the like, they work for us.
