Although my Sequoia was a perfectly fine steed, it was getting pretty beaten up by 100-150 commutes each year. It seemed to be on first-name basis with the mechanics at Spokes Etc., my local bike store, and City Bikes, a marvelous bike store in DC. The Sequoia had served me well for well over 20,000 miles. I resolved at the end of last summer to buy a new bike and use the Sequoia for a back up.

If you are ever thinking about buying a bike and want a good selection, shop in the Spring. By September, most bike shops are loaded with frames suitable for dwarfs and goliaths. The normal sized bikes are all gone.

I was prepared to spend upwards of $2,000 on my new bike. I wanted an honest to God touring bike, a truly worthy successor to the Sequoia. It had to have low gearing, eyelets for attaching racks and fenders, drop handlebars, and a somewhat upright seating position. These specifications, as it turns out, are regarded as completely unreasonable to most mass market bicycle companies. I could find bikes with some but not all the specs I needed.

There was one additional major complication. About eight years ago, I had an operation to remove a ruptured disk in my lower back. The operation was a success, but I had to spend months and months tweaking my Sequoia so that my new back could tolerate riding. (I reluctantly had to sell my Trek 1200 road bike.) After monkeying around with saddle and handlebar positions, I bought a new high rise stem. This led to problems with my headset. No matter what I did, the headset kept loosening up. This was finally fixed by a trip to City Bikes where Paul the mechanic swapped a very thin washer for the stock washer inside the headset. My post-surgery mechanical problems made me very wary. Before I bought a $2,000 bike, I wanted to ride it to see if it fit exactly right.

I have read a number of tour journals and some of the more intriguing bikes I have seen have been Bike Fridays. These bikes fold up into a suitcase but supposedly ride like conventional bikes. I added these to the list of other candidates, including a Bianci and a Trek, and hit the road. I found both the Bianci and Trek at my local bike store. The Bianci had too long a reach and the Trek was too small. I then traveled nearly 60 miles to Mt. Airy, MD to try out a Bike Friday. They had several in stock but they felt very twitchy and I couldn't shake the sensation that I looked like a circus clown. The Mt. Airy store also has recumbents and I tried a few. The ones they had in my size were unbelievably comfortable but I couldn't figure out how I could ever tour with one. Also, the normally very helpful staff was in the middle of some sort of inventory snafu and were not much help. So I went to their sister store in College Park MD. They didn't have anything in stock but they offered to let me borrow bikes for a few days and try them out. They also offered to spec a custom conventional touring bike for me that they were certain would fit me perfectly. All of these offers seemed like more trouble than they were worth. I wanted to test ride bikes and I didn't want to drive back and forth 30 miles to a bike shop to do it. Still the store personnel were quite helpful and knowledgeable, and they gave me a short course in recumbent riding which eventually turned out to be very important.

Another encounter with recumbents stuck in the back of my mind. One day while waiting for yet another Sequoia repair at Spokes, two sunburned bike tourists from Indiana walked in. One was pretty banged up. They both rode long wheelbase recumbents and had been touring all summer east of the Mississippi. One of them had gone off the shoulder of the road and crashed bending his steering mechanism in the process. These two guys had traveled a couple thousand miles and were all smiles despite their recent misfortune. They were a rolling advertisement for recumbent bike touring.

My next bike shop turned out to be my last. I drove to Bikes@Vienna which sells (among other things) folding bikes and recumbents. They didn't have any conventional Bike Fridays available to ride that day so I took the time to focus on recumbents. And John Brunow, the owner, spent the time to adjust the bikes to my comfort level. I rode at least ten bikes that day. To his enormous credit, John never complained (at least not in my presence). I took each bike out for a 3-5 mile ride on the Washington and Old Dominion rail trail a couple of blocks away. On the way back to the shop, I found a nice steep hill to test each bike's climbing and descending abilities.

I whittled my choice down to 3 bikes: a Bike SatRDay (Bike Friday's folding recumbent), a Sun EZ Sport Lite, and an Easy Racers Tour Easy. I went home to think it over. The SatRDay surprised me with its nice ride, but it looked rather intimidating mechanically. The EZ Sport Lite was pretty comfortable and the price was much less than the other two, but the handlebars had an unsettling tendency to loosen under stress. The Tour Easy was by far the nicest ride, but it was very long and I worried about transporting it. A few weeks later I went back and did a 'ride off'. The Tour Easy won hands down. I bought one with a rack and fenders.

In addition to being super comfortable, the Tour Easy with a fairing (windshield) that I later added is quite a bit faster than the Sequoia. I had a number of initial problems, including nasty knee troubles, some crashes, and a bad back episode. After many tweaks to the seating position, I ironed out these wrinkles. A few weeks ago I took the Tour Easy for a 56 mile romp in and near the Blue Ridge Mountains. I took my time and, despite quite a bit of climbing, I finished the ride in 4 hours with no back or neck pain. What a revelation this machine was.

Once my bluff was called, it had become apparent that any bike trip I was going to do had to be on the Tour Easy. So I began to plan.