In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!
One of the earliest pages I ever set up on this blog, besides the one you are now reading, was the page I set up for "The Touring Series". This page is a compilation of the stories from two, fully loaded, fully self-supported bicycle tours I was on back in the mid-1990's.
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| A rare image from my 1996 tour to the Black Hills. Troy Meyermann (L) is next to me. Image by Ryan Stibal. |
I was reminded of these tours when a customer came into the Cedar Valley Bicycle Collective, where I work, and mentioned Troy Meyermann's name. Troy, Ryan Stibal, and Steve Thune were the three guys I did these tours with. It isn't often that I think about those days anymore, so it was a pleasant reminder of a difficult time in my life. (Read the series if you are curious)
The blog served as a host to these tales of these tours in a weekly series dubbed "Touring Tuesdays". The series actually ran twice here as I decided that some newly discovered materials and commentary might enhance the series so I just reran it again on Tuesdays. I figured that at the time I was doing run 2, which would have been about six years ago, I had more readers than I had the first time I ran it, so it was that I posted on the series until 2019 in March when I ran the last post.
What is also pertinent to this blog is that some of those tales from the touring days were written down immediately afterward or during the touring. That points to my desire to write stories even back then. I'm very glad I did write that stuff down because at that point in time cameras that took a lot of pictures were not an option. Oh.....not digital cameras, film cameras. Digital was some years off at the time we did these tours.
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| Ryan Stibal taking a shot of me trudging up a long grade in South Dakota somewhere. Image by Troy Meyermann |
And yeah, no cell phones either. We had to find a land-line if we wanted to call home, and otherwise no one knew where we were! Can you even imagine this in 2024? No GPS, no tracking, nothing. And we didn't think twice about this. It was all we knew.
I'm not going to get all into what era was "better" or not, but I will say I am really, really grateful I took the chances I did in 1994 and 1995 to do these rides. I am super-grateful I had the desire to write stories about these rides back then. But also, these were really different times. Looking back on these days, it was as if we were from another planet. So much has changed since then.
And so much is still the same. I love riding bicycles and writing stories. I'm hopeful I get to do that for a long time yet.
3 comments:
That would’ve been an awesome trip to be a part of. Those days were so different from today in so many ways. I’m glad you got that experience.
Were you on the Touring@phred mail list back in your touring days ?
There was a company that would sell you paper maps from all over the world,
half the fun was getting the maps and figuring a route. Calling overseas at 5am to try to maker reservations, faxed confirmations.
@scottg - No, I was not, and I don't think I was aware of that at all. We did draw on some wizened touring veterans from the day for some advice on our own set ups and route.
I remember a man that had his bags itemized and locations for everything in his bags on a list he could break out on the road so he wouldn't waste time filing through bags looking for certain items. Then there were two other guys that told me that they had done a similar route that we were planning through South Dakota and that we should go during August because the prevailing winds were often East to West. I thought that odd, but you know what? They were right!
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