Bicycling

Bicycle touring means self-contained cycling trips for pleasure, adventure, and autonomy rather than sport, commuting, or exercise. Touring can range from single-to multi-day trips, even years. Tours may be planned by the participant or organised by a holiday business, a club, or a charity as a fund-raising venture.

The bicycle gained from the outdoor movement of the 1930s. The Cyclists' Touring Club advertised a week's all-in tour, staying at hotels recommended by cyclists, for £3 10s. The youth hostel movement started in Germany and spread abroad, and a cycling holiday staying at hostels in the 1930s could be had for £2. Roderick Watson and Martin Gray estimate there were ten million bicycles in Britain to one million cars.

A decline set in across Europe, particularly in Britain, when millions of servicemen returned from World War II having learned to drive. Trips away were now, for the increasing number who had one, by car. The decline in the United States came even sooner. McGurn says:

The story of inter-war cycling was characterised by lack of interest and a steady decline... Cycling had lost out to the automobile, and to some extent to the new electric transport systems. In the 1930s cumbersome, fat-tyred 'balloon bombers', bulbously streamlined in imitation of motorcycles or aeroplanes, appealed to American children: the only mass market still open to cycle manufacturers. Wartime austerity gave cycling a short reprieve in the industrial world. The post-war peace was to lay the bicycle low.^[1]

However, between 1965 and 1975 the USA experienced a bike boom. In 1976, to celebrate the bicentennial of the founding of the United States, Greg Siple, his wife, June, and Dan Lys Burden organized a mass bike ride, Bikecentennial, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Siple said:

My original thought was to send out ads and flyers saying, 'Show up at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco at 9 o'clock on June 1 with your bicycle.' And then we were going to bicycle across the country. I pictured thousands of people, a sea of people with their bikes and packs all ready to go, and there would be old men and people with balloon-tire bikes and Frenchmen who flew over just for this. Nobody would shoot a gun off or anything. At 9 o'clock everybody would just start moving. It would be like this crowd of locustscrossing America^[14]

The ride eventually ran from Astoria, Oregon, to Yorktown, Virginia, site of the first British settlements; 4,100 rode, with 2,000 completing the entire route. It defined a new start for cycle-touring in the United States and led to the creation of Adventure Cycling Association. Adventure Cycling has mapped routes across America and into Canada, many of the rides taking up to three months to complete on a loaded bicycle.