Ride a S24O: The Quick and Easy Bike Tour

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"Just Ride” is a manual for the “unracer” — the rider looking for a reason to shuck the click-in pedals and uncomfortable bikes and grueling rides, without feeling like it’s throwing in the towel. It’s full of suggestions and recommendation on riding your bike outside the strange and often dysfunctional influences of racing, and having a better time on the bike because of it.  
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Enjoy bike touring by breaking it up into brief outings as short as 24 hours.
Enjoy bike touring by breaking it up into brief outings as short as 24 hours.

A reformed racer who’s commuted by bike every day since 1980 and founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works, Grant Petersen shares a lifetime of unexpected facts, controversial opinions, expert techniques and his own philosophy in Just Ride (Workman Publishing, 2012), a collection of 89 short essays on bike culture and practical cycling in everyday life. In this excerpt, Petersen explains how to take on short-and-sweet rides called sub-24-hour overnights, or S24Os.

You can buy this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: Just Ride.

The most fun I have with my bike is during overnight bike-camping trips in the local hills. I call them Sub-24-Hour Overnights, or S24Os, and mine average sixteen hours, typically from about 5:30 in the evening to 9:30 the next morning. I’ve gone on several solo, but the best ones are with good company. I go with one to four of the guys from work, and sometimes local friends.

We load up the bags and baskets with what we need for the night, and leave in the afternoon or evening, and after one to three hours of riding we find a place with a good view and settle for the night. It doesn’t matter if there are city lights and hustle-bustle a few miles away and visible in the distance; there may not be any way around that. You don’t want to hear boom boxes, but even just one mile of pavement-free earth between you and city lights and noise is enough isolation to let you pretend you’re in the boonies.

The great thing about the S24O is that it minimizes any problems in planning, packing, weather, bike imperfections, or anything else that might wreck a long tour. If you mess up and forget to bring something, or if the weather turns foul, it’s OK, because everything will be back to normal tomorrow.

  • Published on Jan 21, 2013
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