My Multistate Bicycle Camping Trips

I made my first bicycle camping trip in 1965. On that trip and since, all of my trips have shared certain characteristics: 1) a strong tendency to start and end at my home, 2) a determined self-reliance and independence, 3) weeks of camping out, eating simple, and living on little, and 4) a focus on Nature -- the animals, the plants, the sky, the streams, the lakes, and the mountains. Some have asked me how I managed to make so many trips, but I have always felt bothered that I haven't made more.

My bicycle camping trips fall into two quite different groups: my instate trips and my multistate trips. Over two-thirds of my trips are within one state or include a little of a second state. These trips are shorter, are usually made for a different purpose than the trip itself (seeing a relative, going fishing or caving, or to reach some other destination), and were not written up or photographed. My instate camping trips have covered about 6,000 miles.

My multistate trips, on the other hand, are super vacations -- opportunities for me to vacate my usual humdrum existence and to enter a fanasty land of discovery, experience, and enjoyment. I also tend to meet a good number of cyclists on these trips, including usually more than a dozen long-distance travelers. A careful log, many photos, maps, and notes of each trip are brought back home, from which the current accounts have been written, although two trips, in 1966 and 2000, were written entirely while traveling.

The Trip Stats

My Multistate Bicycle Camping Trips	Year	Miles	Travel Days	Camp Nights
Smokies	1965	573	8	6
Ontario   Part II	1966	3,422	49	47
Spruce Pine	1971	430	11	10
Pennsylvania	1988	2,515	36	31
Colorado   Part II    Part III	1990	4,408	67	58
Seven Southern States Loop	1991	1,369	21	14
New England	1993	2,049	39	28
Ontario II	1995	2,878	41	22
Pennsylvania II	1996	2,709	46	27
Plains-Ontario Loop    Part II	1998	4,729	68	63
Eastern North American Tour II III IV V VI VII	2000	4,530	82	66
Totals for all trips	11 trips	29,112	468	372

A Map of My Long-Distance Bicycle Trips

This map is not to scale, and the routes were drawn freehand.  The lines on this map are too wide to show the position of the roads accurately, and I deliberately omitted some roads in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania that were too close together. This map shows only the roads covered on my multistate bicycle camping trips and does not include other roads traveled on on other rides and trips in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Routes are in red, water is blue, traveled states and provinces are yellow, and untraveled states and provinces are in red.