Category Archives: Bike Touring

Repost: Ellee Thalheimer, Oregon’s Bike Touring Authority

Posted on May 8, 2014 by josh| Leave a comment


Ellee on tour. Photo via author’s website.

This interview with guidebook author Ellee Thalheimer was originally published in July 2012. I am reposting it to celebrate the release of her new Washington state bike touring guidebook Cycling Sojourner: A Guide to the Best Multi-day Tours in Washington! Click here to purchase your own copy of this awesome book.

Portland, OR’s Ellee Thalheimer is an author, freelance travel writer, and avid bike tourist. Her newest book, Cycling Sojourner, is a guide to multi-day, self-supported touring in Oregon, the only one of its kind for the state. I reviewed the book last month then finally got a chance to talk to Ellee as she wrapped up her book tour and some exploratory bike touring for another potential touring guide. We spoke about her past experiences touring nationally and abroad, her background in writing, her process for Cycling Sojourner, and more.

Continue reading →

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Bike Touring, Cycling Media, Interviews

Tagged , , , , ,

Buy the Book: Cycling Sojourner Washington

Posted on May 2, 2014 by josh| Leave a comment

CyclingSojournerWA_BookCover_July2013I’m excited to announce the release of Cycling Sojourner: A Guide to the Best Multi-day Tours in Washington! This brand new guidebook covers nine distinct tours all around Washington state, from the coast to Walla Walla’s wine region to the San Juan Islands and lots in between. In author/publisher Ellee Thalheimer’s words:

The nine tours in the book provide meticulously laid out nuts and bolts information, including cue sheets, maps, and information about weather, difficulty level, camping and lodging options and how to get to the ride’s start. Yet, the soul of the book lies in the voices of the five authors, four of whom are Washingtonians, who use storytelling, local history, and humor to elevate the book beyond just an everyday guidebook to an inspirational muse that draws out your inner adventurer.

I wrote two chapters for Cycling Sojourner.  The first: an easy overnight tour from Seattle to Tolt MacDonald Park in Carnation targeted at beginner bike tourists looking to get their feet wet and experienced tourists looking for an easy escape from the city. The second: a challenging, rewarding, beautiful tour of the Olympic Peninsula. Riding the Peninsula was one of the most spectacular bike adventures I’ve ever had. I wrote a little bit about the experience for the Cycling Sojourner blog.

Interested in getting your hands on this awesome book? You can buy a copy from The Bicycle Story! Get inspired for many summer’s worth of adventures AND support The Bicycle Story’s work. It’s a win, win!

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Bike Touring, Cycling Media, Everything Else

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Donnie Kolb: Bikepacking the Oregon Backcountry with VeloDirt

Posted on April 23, 2014 by josh| 1 Comment

9100793405_5474a4e88e_z
Donnie Kolb at the Cowboy Dinner Tree, a restaurant along the Oregon Outback route with 30oz steaks. Photo by Gabriel Amadeus. 

Simply stated, bikepacking is backpacking on a bike. Rather than using touring bikes with panniers, bikepackers use mountain bikes with frame and seat bags that allow them to maintain agility on singletrack trails. And though people have been using bikes to explore trails and dirt roads for about as long as bikes have existed, bikepacking’s popularity has skyrocketed in the past several years with new races and events popping up all over the country and long running events seeing record participation. In Oregon, Donnie Kolb is a central figure in the bikepacking world. In his own words he is, “spreading the gospel of dirt and gravel riding throughout the Pacific Northwest.” His website VeloDirt serves as a resource for bikepacking and gravel road routes throughout Oregon, a travel journal for Kolb’s adventure stories, and a hub for loosely-organized, semi-official bike events. In May, VeloDirt is putting on their largest ride yet, the Oregon Outback. It is a wild, 360-mile route tracing most of the distance of the state south to north. I spoke to Kolb about the history of VeloDirt, his love for bikepacking adventures, the unexpected popularity of the Oregon Outback, and the future of bikepacking in Oregon and beyond.

Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Bike Touring, Interviews, Mountain Biking

Tagged , , , , , ,

Throwback Thursday: Niagara Falls and Tandem Bike Tour Follies

Posted on April 3, 2014 by josh| 3 Comments

13516685474_9bdf8e29fa_z
Mary and Ed. Photo courtesy Mary Gersemalina.

Every week, the #ThrowbackThursday meme fills Twitter and Instagram feeds with photos of friends’ childhoods, drunken college antics, and old vacations and adventures. On The Bicycle Story, #ThrowbackThursday is an opportunity to revisit great bike adventures from year’s past. Today, Mary Gersemalina of Chasing Mailboxes shares a throwback to her first bike tour.

It is June 2005, and my boyfriend Ed and I are going on our first bike tour together. Our route starts in Rockville, Maryland, and from there we will pedal for eight days straight until we reach our final destination of Niagara Falls, Canada. We will not be camping as we’ve chosen the way of the credit card tour.

Our bike of choice for this adventure is a Cannondale mountain tandem. We have been riding tandem together since for the last six months and really love it. Our tour group consists of a small group of around ten cycling friends (including three tandems!), one of whom is our informal tour leader. A genius at routing, she has carefully plotted out our route and overnight stops.

Continue reading →

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Adventure, Bike Touring, Everything Else

Tagged , , , ,

A Throwback to My First Bike Camping Adventure

Posted on March 20, 2014 by josh| 1 Comment

4657_516971358642_1464175_n

Every week, the #ThrowbackThursday meme fills my Twitter and Instagram feeds with photos of friends’ childhoods, drunken college antics, and old vacations and adventures. That stream of remembrance got me thinking about some of my own past bike adventures. I decided to do my own version of Throwback Thursday and tell the story of my first time camping by bike.

I took my first bike camping trip in May of 2009. I’d built up a Long Haul Trucker the previous winter and spent the spring commuting on it between Silver Spring, Maryland where I was living at the time and my newspaper internship in Bethesda. No less prone to daydreaming about bike adventurers then than I am now, I often passed time at my internship thinking up potential trips and chatting about them with my fellow intern and would-be bike tourist, Jeff.

4657_516971248862_2936772_n

The earliest incarnation of my touring bike.

It was Jeff who inspired me to finally make one of those proposed bike adventures a reality. A few days before Memorial Day Weekend, he told me he and his girlfriend Ava were planning an overnight bike trip along the C&O Canal and invited me to come along. Their plan was to ride to the hiker-biker site nearest the White’s Ferry crossing, camp, take the ferry across to Virginia the next morning, then ride back to DC on the Washington & Old Dominion trail. I was on board and set about borrowing a tent from a friend in DC and a decades-old foam sleeping pad from my roommate so that I could join the ride.

Continue reading →

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Adventure, Bike Touring

Tagged , , ,