Active Outdoors: Is bike touring right for you?

It’s one thing to drive somewhere nice and ride your bike for the day, and quite something else to park your car and leave it behind for several days as you tour the countryside by bike. Even if gas prices weren’t steadily rising, there are plenty of other good reasons to make a bicycle the transportation centerpiece of your vacation travels this summer. As I write this, my sweetheart Marilyn and I have just started a four-night, five-day getaway on our tandem bike, and I can already think of five good reasons why it’s better than traveling by car.

First, traveling entirely by bike makes a getaway to even the most familiar destination a new and fresh adventure. Marilyn and I go to Cape Cod almost every year to bike, kayak, explore different places to stay and eat, and search out different things to do. Much of the time, we have our kayaks with us, as well as our bike, but this year we decided to do Falmouth and Martha’s Vineyard by bike. This is a familiar destination for us, but traveling by bike forces you to take back roads and really see the sights you are passing.

The day of this writing, for example, we pedaled our tandem touring bike from Onset (where we parked our car at a relative’s house) to the edge of the Cape Cod Canal, across the Bourne Bridge (okay, we walked the bike across the bridge). From there we took Shore Road most of the way down to North Falmouth, where we picked up the Shining Sea Bikeway. Along the way, we saw hundreds of beautiful houses and gardens, had our choice of restaurants we’d never seen before and never would have found if we had driven our car down busy Route 28. I guarantee you that if you bike to a familiar destination you’ll find lots of new and interesting stuff on the way.

Active Outdoors: Is bike touring right for you? | Concord Monitor