HOW WE CREATE OUR TOURS Adventure Velo tours are designed for cyclists of at least moderate fitness and experience. The routes have not been watered down for beginners or marginal riders by choosing the flattest, least challenging, “safest” options. On the other hand, they don’t go out of their way to find the steepest, nastiest hills either. Some of the longer, hillier options are quite tough, but they are often paired with shorter, flatter alternatives. To give you some idea how these tours were created, let me list the criteria I employ in choosing a route, and explain their relative importance. Once I’ve homed in on a particular region as a desirable cycling destination, I work through the following checklist: • Mileage • Accommodations • Traffic/Safety • Scenery • Topography • Complexity of directions • Quality of road surface • Points of interest • Wind direction • Mileage A typical tour day is about 100K or 60-65 miles. That’s our target. Many of the stages have longer and shorter options. Some include Short-cuts–shorter even than the short route–for folks who need a really easy day. Some include Bonus Miles add-ons for the hammerheads in the crowd. Sometimes the distance between campsites dictates a longer stage. Sometimes a stage will be shortened to allow time for sightseeing at a local point of interest. The shortest days on any of our tours are around 40 miles, while the longest–including optional add-ons–are around 90 miles. • Accommodations Mileage and accommodations are so intertwined they’re actually equal...because you can’t have a tour without decent places to hang out and sleep after the ride. Finding good campsites is every bit as challenging as finding good cycling roads. We make use of state, national, county, and municipal parks, as well as many private camping resorts. We try to find attractive campgrounds in pleasant areas...places where it’s fun and interesting to be after the ride. We also try to find sites with showers, and failing that, camps with lakes or rivers or swimming pools to wash away the day’s grime. • Traffic/Safety No one likes to ride in traffic. We try to avoid it whenever possible. One of the best things about the little-known back roads on these tours is their lack of traffic. However, from time to time, we have to ride on busier roads, if only to connect two sections of quiet byways. When riding a busier highway becomes neccesary, I try to choose ones with wide shoulders. I also try, whenever possible, to put riders on the roads at a time of day or on a day of the week when I know that highway will be more lightly travelled. • Scenery While Miles, Accommodations, and Traffic have to take precedence in planning a route, the real reason we’re out there on the backroads is the scenery...riding in beauty. Discovering beautiful back-country scenery is my greatest delight as a cyclist, and also as a tour planner. There may be a few unavoidable miles of suburban sprawl and commercial clutter here and there on these tours, but for the most part, these routes take you out into the most spectacular natural settings in this vast and varied state. Enjoy! • Topography (aka Hills) Civilization tends to grow along the river valleys and coastlines...near water. Sometimes that means the congestion (traffic and clutter) ends up in those relatively flat areas as well. When that happens, these tours often head for the hills to escape to quiet backroads. These tours do not avoid hills. Nor do they seek them out just to be gratuitously brutal. When the tours offer longer and shorter options on a stage, the shorter option is almost always much less hilly...but that can also mean that it has to deal with more traffic as well. • Complexity of Directions We don’t want you to get lost, so as much as possible, we avoid extremely complicated route directions. That tricky little short-cut you use to dodge around the back streets and avoid the busy highway–in your hometown–may be just too complex to explain on a route slip. We’ll take the tricky route if we think it’s important enough, but as a rule, we try to keep it simple. • Road surface Lightly travelled backroads often fall to the bottom of the list when highway maintenance budgets are being divvied up. The result is sometimes that the quality of the pavement varies in inverse proportion to the remoteness of the road and the beauty of the surrounding landscape. But if lousy pavement is the price we pay for escaping from traffic and sprawl, we will usually pay that price on these tours. Happily, that isn’t always the case, and in many instances, we’ve found wonderfully quiet roads through the middle of nowhere that are smooth as silk. • Points of interest I try whenever possible to identify and discuss points of interest along the routes, and will sometimes even bend a route around to include them. Stopping to enjoy a waterfall or a historic site is a great excuse to get off the bike and break out of the paceline-from-hell mode. • Wind Everyone hates headwinds. If I know that the wind blows from a certain direction in a prevailing pattern, I will do everything I can to route the stage in a downwind direction. Unfortunately, the wind is seldom that predictable, and that’s why this item is at the bottom of the list. Adventure Velo 7315 Fircrest Avenue Sebastopol, CA 95472 707-823-9807 backroad@sonic.net