Ireally enjoy bike touring. Actually, I enjoy it in theory mostly, since I rarely do it any more. By touring I mean the self contained kind, where you strap on your panniers, and head for parts unknown, just you and your credit card.
You may have gathered I'm not into the carrying pots and pans and preparing food from scratch. My culinary expertise at home is usually limited to preparing toast. So why should I try to fabricate gastronomic delights with a collection of grotty aluminum pans and a camp stove that can be coerced to ignite only with the application of massive quantities of raw gasoline when I'm on tour. My cooking utensil of choice is the microwave oven, and it would require a rather long extension cord were I to bring it along.
So meals when I'm touring are more a question of survival. An army moves on its stomach and so does a bicycle tour. On my last major tour, a trip to Ohio with my son Colin, we got into a feeding pattern. We would get up, have breakfast, ride for a while, have breakfast #2, ride for a while, eat some more, etc. I realized the reason our average speed was so low was that we spent a significant portion of the day feeding. We ended up having some pretty bizarre meals. We would generally try for a sit down dinner at a restaurant, but often found ourselves in the situation where the only available food supply was from the ubiquitous convenience store. On that trip, potato salad ruled.
Incidentally, the two breakfast idea is the budget traveller's way to go. For whatever reason, the restaurant price of food seems to escalate as the day progresses, i.e., breakfast is cheaper than lunch is cheaper than dinner. The witching hour varies a bit, but you can generally depend on being able to get breakfast type vittles until about 11 AM. There were a number of tense moments on the tour as we had to sprint to get to breakfast #2 before it turned into lunch.
Mechanical problems seem to crop up with uncommon regularlity on bike tours. For the Ohio trip I got out the old Raleigh, which I hadn't used in a number of years. Noticed that there was an awful lot of rust on the rear wheel spokes, and I'd have to fix that as soon as I got back. It was on that tour that I learned it was possible to cycle with three broken spokes for quite a while. Twice. Heck, I still had 33 good ones (or if not good, at least not yet broken), that's over 90%.
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