Putting together a rider lead tour is a large undertaking. Instead of hiring a tour company such as Trek Travel or Backroads, we plan and execute the tour as on a rider volunteer basis. It takes a good size team of people to pull this off.
The detail planning starts in January with the selection of the ride location, often from a selection of several possibilities. This year, the tour coordinator, A.K.A cat hearder, was Kevin. we also had a team of folks working our the hotel accommodations, a team for dinner and breakfasts locations, a transportation coordinator to take care of truck rentals and bike rentals, a ferry coordinator to figure out the ferry details and a route coordinator who took the information from the hotel group and the ferry coordinator to plot the routes. Finally the tour treasurer estimates the trip expenses and sets the budget for the hotels, dining and other expenses. The treasurer also monitors the expenses during the tour to insure that all the tour bills will be paid.
By planning our own tour, we have the ability to control the daily ride length and the tour duration. Many of the commercial tours are a week long. Our riders often request a longer tour length. This tour was 13 riding days.
Over the years, technology has enabled better communications. We set up a website to coordinate the trip planning and all the routes were on an app called RideWithGPS that allowed a wide range of GPS devices to download the daily routes. The need for paper maps and route directions are no longer required because of the widely used bike GPS devices
By the numbers
10 ferries
13 cycling days
664 miles total miles
51 miles daily average
72 miles longest day
37 miles shortest day
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