Sarah Tisdale
I did an ~1800mi tour (Wyoming to Pacific coast) with ten others last
summer. There was a mix of trailers and panniers. Each setup had good and
bad points, but all worked pretty well. Personally, I used a single-wheel
"Bob" trailer with an 1985-ish steel road bike and it worked great.
1) If your bike isn't made for touring (ie a lighter road bike), you
probably can't add panniers, but you can usually still add a trailer.
2) A couple in the group had trailers with two wheels. These were great
most of the time, but on a couple days we had long sections of road with
"rumble strips" on the shoulder. This was difficult for two-wheel trailers
because the shoulder right of the rumble strip wasn't wide enough for the
whole trailer, and it was difficult to "straddle" the strip between the bike
tires and a trailer tire. They had to choose between riding entirely in the
road, riding with one trailer wheel off the road, or riding on the rumble
strip.
3) Think carefully about everything you're bringing. You'll probably still
have too much and you'll curse it on the hills. Stop in town post-offices
and use Priority Mail Flat-Rate-Boxes (
http://www.usps.com/prices/priority-mail-prices.htm) to send extra stuff
home. I did this three different times along my trip.
4) Take a weekend practice trip before the big adventure.
Sarah
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 8:01 AM, Adam K. wrote:
> Hi,
> We have some friends coming to the west coast to ride from Seattle to Santa
> Barbara via the Coastal Hwy. My question is would it be better to use
> panniers or a trailer for this type of touring? And if a trailer seems to
> be more popular choice, which model would be most efficient on this type of
> terrain?
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