Bicycle Touring Might Be Your Most Rewarding Accomplishment This Year

Would you like to accomplish something GREAT this year? Something that challenges you, makes you feel good and is so incredibly rewarding that you will remember it for the rest of your life?

If that sounds like something you want for yourself… then I’m here to encourage you, right now, to start planning and preparing for your own bicycle touring adventure!

For the last 19 years I have been traveling around the world on a bicycle… and for the last 11 years I have been teaching other people how to travel long-distances by bike. (If you haven’t done so already, you should really read my book or sign-up for my how-to bike tour video training course and start planning your dream bike tour today.)

I love bicycle touring… and I have experienced many personal benefits from traveling long-distances on my bicycle, but one of the best things about bike touring is the fact that it is a goal that almost anyone can accomplish.

That’s right. Conducting an overnight bike tour of your own is something YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH!

If you can ride a bicycle, you can go bicycle touring… and you will be surprised at just how far you can go when you put your mind to it.

Now, as I’m writing this, we are ringing in a New Year… and this is a time of year when a lot of people like to talk about goal setting.

I’m personally a huge goal setter. Goal setting is how I accomplished my first bike tour at age 17… and it’s how I was able to take my dream of becoming a professional cyclist and turn it into a reality. Setting a goal and then slowly working toward accomplishing that goal is how you accomplish big things in life.

But one of the things about goal setting is… it isn’t always easy!

Sometimes you can spend months or even years working toward a big life goal and not get any closer to making that thing happen. In addition to that, sometimes it’s difficult to even measure whether or not you’re getting any closer to your goal.

But bicycle touring isn’t like that!!!

Participating a multi-day bike touring adventure is something that almost anyone can accomplish because measuring your progress on a bicycle tour is easy.

It’s easy because, as long as you are able to cycle even 1 mile (or 1 kilometer) on any given day, you are moving closer toward your goal (the finish line for your bike tour)… and you can actually measure your progress on a map.

Here, for example, is a screenshot from the Maps.me offline mapping application I use to navigate on my smartphone. This is from a bike tour I conducted this past summer in Portugal in Spain.

Look at the map and you will see that I started the bike tour in Porto, Portugal and then began cycling north up the coastline with the goal of reaching Santiago de Compostella, Spain by the end of the week.

As you can see, I made quick progress on the first day of the bike tour. Day two was another substantial day of cycling. Day 3 wasn’t nearly as far, but day four was a solid day in the saddle. Day 5 was incredibly short, but I still made forward progress. And on day 6 I completed the bike tour by cycling the final leg into the city of Santiago de Compostella. Hurray!

The distances here don’t really matters. What matters is that my forward progress on this particular bike tour could be visibly seen, mapped and measured. As long as I kept moving forward, it was obvious that I was getting closer and closer to my final goal… and after only six days of cycling, I had done it! I had cycled all the way from Porto, Portugal to Santiago de Compostella.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

This is what I love about bicycle touring: Setting a goal, moving slowly toward that goal, measuring my progress along the way, eventually reaching that goal, and then being able to look back and see just how far I have come.

Bike touring is a great example of how powerful setting a goal can be and then working, day by day, to get closer and closer to that goal.

If only all goals in life were so easy!

If only all goals in life could be mapped out so obviously!

If only all goals in life could be charted and physically measured!

As the Bicycle Touring Pro (the world’s leading expert on bike travel and personal coach to thousands of people all around the world), I hope that you will set the goal of conducting your own bicycle touring this year… and I hope that the articles, books, courses, podcasts and videos I have created here at www.bicycletouringpro.com will help you to get you out on a bike tour of your own this year while removing all the guesswork, wasted time and frustration that plagues so many first-time bicycle travelers.

• Click here to download my FREE Bicycle Touring Pro starter guide and sign up for the FREE Bicycle Touring Pro email newsletter.
• Click here to read my best-selling how-to book, “The Bicycle Touring Blueprint.”
• Or click here and learn how to conduct your own amazing bike tours with the help of my bike touring video training course.

As for the New Year, I wish you much success, happiness and lots of good times… and I hope all of your dreams come true. Thank you for your continued support and best wishes to you and your family in the future.

PS – If you do end up conducting a bike tour of your own this year, make sure to take a photo of you and your bicycle while you are out there on the road and then send that photo to me along with a paragraph or two telling me about your trip (where you went in the world, how far you cycled, what the best moment of the bike tour was, etc.) so I can add you to my ever-expanding list of Bicycle Touring Pro success stories.