Go on a Touring Trip - Plan it Well

If you wish to remain romantically attached or even friends with your pillion, consider their comfort. They need more than a token piece of foam and a prayer as a handrail as you set sail for the horizon – leaving someone battered and bruised in settling dust and fairing debris is not a good tactic! You have a legal obligation to look after them, I can tell you, from personal experience, that an few thousand kilometer trip in a few weeks on an aging touring bike did cement a still strong 20-year relationship despite a couple of “I'm walking” threats on horrendous dirt roads and a dusty detour on some gravel roads.

Time is your friend and enemy. As a benchmark, you can usually average, during a day ride, about 40km/h below your cruising speed. Too many people leave late in the day, stop early and perhaps miss the mystique of touring, standing as the sun blasts over the horizon signaling another adventure.

It's difficult to explain the joy of seeing dawn splitting the night sky, a grey ghost which quickly loses its glow and becomes a blinding white light. Try it and you may become addicted. The dawning of a new day.

Let's not bring in the speed limit issue. At 100km/h I am barely functional, struggling to stay awake, a danger to other road users. The choice is yours as to how fast you go. Most people over-estimate the distance they can ride in a day, so plan. Six hours at an average of 70km/h means 420km per day and that will let you do a good quantity of sightseeing. Everybody hates it: the best strategy is to strut your stuff before breakfast if you want to put in a 1000km day. Keep the horizontal folk dancing until sunset and plan to put away 300km of relatively featureless touring before breakfast. Remember the beauty of sunrise...

An early start allows a more relaxed approach to the remainder of the day. So you need to plan your trip. Sitting in service stations for an hour puts you back on the road with a lot of potential distance lost. Try catching that car that went past 10 minutes ago, sitting on the speed limit. Unless you go ballistic it will take a long time to catch it.