Welcome Aboard!!!
How about sharing your bicycle tour experience here?
I dropped out of Christian College and went home to work on a chicken farm to save money for gear and a little spending money. The night before I left, one of the farm hands convinced me to go with him to a Choctaw Casino and I made and I ended up winning an extra $500.
The next day, I left on my bicycle. I was headed south from Oklahoma to Dallas, TX to meet up with my buddy who was joining me on my adventure.
About 2 miles away from home, my bicycle chain snapped lol. (I had a cheap walmart bicycle. Super Ill-prepared for this trip)
So, I ended up hitching the rest of the way to Deep Ellum/Dallas.
It took me two days but I made it to my buddies house.
We spent a couple weeks busking down town for extra cash for weed and for me a new bicycle. I ended up buying an old hybrid Trek from a guy on Craigslist.
We also bought one of those child carrier/baby trailer things you see soccer moms using to pull their kids behind them on their bike rides. We cut the seats out and used that to store our guitars, packs, food, etc.
We had an epic mushroom trip the night before we left that somehow culminated with the public viewing of the implosion/Demolition of the old Dallas Cowboys football stadium.
The next morning, We packed all our gear up into my buddy's honda and drove to my mom's house to drop off his car. (This trip marked the end of his stay in Dallas. We had planned to bike all the way up the east coast to New York and over to his home town in Minneapolis).
We spent the night there, and left for the first day of biking the next morning.
We rode through southeast OK into southwest Arkansas the first day. It was then we realized we were totally unprepared for the massive physical endeavor this trip turned out to be.
We slowly made our way through Southern Arkansas. We mostly camped in the woods along the way, but we also occasionally stopped at mcdonalds' for their internet to find couch surfers to stay with.
Tons of insane/awesome shit happened throughout this leg of the trip that I wont go into here suffice to say lots more shrooms were had.
We finally made it to Memphis, TN after I dont even know how long. It had been our goal all along to make it to memphis for "Memphis In May - Blues Festival". We got there about a week earlier than expected so we couch surfed with some kind people that let us stay for 8 days before and during the festival.
More insanity ensued.
The shrooms, the drinking, the lack of preparation, lack of sleep, etc were starting to take their toll on our relationship. My buddy was always an eccentric dude (that's why I asked him to go on this trip with me), but now he was starting to reveal that he was actually mentally Ill (although I didnt know this at the time).
One night about a days ride into Nashville, TN my buddy got up in the night and ran off into the woods in his boxer shorts. I had had enough of my buddy's antics at this point to I got up and packed up all the shit that was mine and left in the middle of the night.
I found a bridge to sleep under that night.
The next morning a cop woke me up from sleep and asked me if I knew a guy by the name of (my buddy's name that I've chosen to omit) and I said yes. He gave me a ride back into one of the hospitals back in a town we had passed through the day before. There was my buddy, now dressed in an orange jump suit, hand cuffed to a hospital bed.
A lady came in and asked me to step out into the hall.
She told me they found him walking naked down the road in the middle of the night and she was called in and she diagnosed him with stage 3 paranoid schizophrenia. then they took him off to a mental institution. (He stayed for about a month, got out and has since gotten on the right drugs and has become SUPER successful as a web designer in Minneapolis)
After this I went on to Nashville, busked around for a while, then turned back and headed back home to Oklahoma.
This was overall quite a wild and somewhat stressful first experience on the road, but I wouldn't change a thing about it now looking back.
A couple years later, I went out again. This time I Hitchhiked solo and I had much more fun, and saw a lot more country.
