Nice trip! Eagerly awaiting your summer adventures.

50°C is 127°F! Oh. My. Gawd. That's quite likely to be lethal. Glad it proved otherwise.

Thank you for the great info. I will certainly look into this before my next trip.

Head nodding … definite agreement. I think putting in my long career has led to believe a warm, dry room with running hot water is now the only option.

I think you put your finger on the two major determinates of increasing cost. Time, of course, allows customary inflation, and special events like war and pandemic. But age could be an underrated factor. Getting older does reduce the ability to withstand tougher but cheaper conditions, like tents, hard beds, poor food, longer runs, bikes running but needing repairs, etc, etc. Also, being in that tent having cooked only noodles does not seem quite as romantic as it once did!

Hi Fern, well taken question. We used to use BCAA, but their rates seemed to climb out of sight. We switched to a Quebec based company called Tour-Med. They seem very professional both on the phone and in their web site. And they did make an actual payout without squabbling when Dodie crashed last year.

We think insurance of all types is too expensive to be buying coverage for every little thing that might happen. So we go for quite large deductibles. That way, if something really big happens we are covered, but if it's something smaller, the deductible will not sink our financial ship.

The cost of Tour-Med for the two of us has ranged from $11.50 to 15.50 per day on our last three trips. The total cost seems to be figured from a per day rate, so the longer the trip naturally the greater the cost. None of the insurance companies will cover pre-existing conditions, which makes sense, but there can be differences in for how long they want any condition to be "stable", before they will cover any recurrence. I think Tour-Med talks about three months.

We used to buy one year policies allowing any number of up to 90 day trips, but no one seems to offer that any more, or at least, not to us! Tour-Med seems to offer 30 day trips over a year. It also could be that should we make it over 80 and still be cycling, they will not want to cover us. In that case, we will go anyway!

Hi. As a senior cyclist from Canada I am curious about your health insurance provider. May I inquire as to which company you use? It is difficult to find insurance for travelling senior cyclists! Too risky they say! Too expensive I say!
I do love your journals.

Thanks for the breakdown … I always appreciate seeing this as it gives me an idea, at least, of the real world nature of a cycling trip. I have always thought in terms of average daily cost which has continued to increase as time and age goes by.

Yes that has happened to me once before. My big ring got bent just slightly. So I just replaced the big outer ring. So now I put styrofoam or wrap up with egg carton type stuff over the cranks & tape up. I use tin cans or my metal water bottles over any metal parts that stick up. I use a big zipper bag with wheels to pull along or just one without wheels but lined with cardboard & I throw away & fold bag to carry along. The suitcase isn’t great & since I have front wheel motor it’s hard to remove so won’t fit into case. As for trailer use. I rigged up a blue plastic base to use with trailer. That way I just place a bag & use bungee cords to hold it on. Weight is way less than suitcase. I bought blue EM Plastic Hi-Core Corrugated Sheet from Rona, cut to size & drilled holes where screws belong & glued washers on both sides of holes. I can send pic if you want to see. It is very strong & works good. I haven’t taken it on tour yet. I think my travoy trailer will go with me to China as I plan to leave my bike at my cousin’s house. But I need to carry my bags so will need it to carry the bigger items. I will use 2 small ammo boxes for the LiGo batteries so not use rear panniers. Did you know the LiGo batteries are discontinued and Grin is working on different batteries. He hasn’t anything at the moment. I keep checking site to see what he has invented.

I have BOB but wouldn't expect to fly with it. I pull it with my mountain bike when I'm riding the C&O Canal.

Mine has 16 inch, not 20 inch / 406 tires so it still doesn't fix that issue.

I've never weighed it but am certain it outweighs my panniers. My mountain bike is not configured to accept racks so a trailer is my best option in that use case.

We started out using the BOB trailers. This does not solve, but only increases the difficulty of air travel, but it does address two of the shortcomings you mentioned: the single wheel tracks right behind you, and the tire is the same size as the Bike Friday. We switched to panniers, though, because unless you are leaving from and returning to home, the trailer is a whole extra thing. We never did seriously consider the Bike Friday trailer idea, for the reasons you mentioned.

About flying with the bikes in the cases, quite aside from storage, we used to struggle with getting them to fit. Our two bikes have different frame and stem dimensions, so we needed two different configurations, and we used to carry photos and maps to remind us how to do it. We also included a note for TSA advising them that if they pulled stuff out of the case there was no way they would get it back in.

The Andersens say they always succeed in getting hotels to hold their cases, but they are clearly better at this than we have ever been!

I rode my Bike Friday on last summer's tour. It flew to the starting point in its suitcase. Prior to the tour itself my wife and I spent a week together at my family reunion, so I had the luxury of sending the case back home with her at the end of that week rather than having to worry about storing or shipping it. Knowing that was going to be the plan we chose an airline whose luggage policy allows two checked bags per person for no additional charge.

There were several reasons I elected not to use the trailer adapter (which I have), and to use panniers instead.

1: Gross weight. The suitcase and trailer together weigh about 20 pounds when empty. My four panniers weighed 8 pounds. That gave me 12 pounds to play with: I could either save the weight or spend it by carrying more stuff. I elected to save the weight.

2: Track width. The trailer's wheels do not align with the wheels on the bike, extending the "footprint" horizontally in both directions. That means that I would be forced to ride a foot or more farther into a traffic lane than I would otherwise need to do. On a shoulderless two-lane road, that's not appealing. Nor do I want to have my line further affected by things such as rumble strips, which are not always conveniently located with regard to smooth cycling.

3: Complexity. The trailer tires are a different size than those on the bike, meaning I'd need to carry even more spare tubes and tires than I would if using panniers.

4: Visibility. It's far from a certainty in my mind that drivers would actually see and account for the trailer. Although it doesn't extend very far past my left shoulder, if at all, it's just one more thing to fret about.

5: Maneuverability. I've dragged the trailer enough to know that the bike just isn't as agile, particularly on tight turns and in cramped quarters, as when it's not behind me.

The few upsides to the trailer simply cannot outweigh the downsides I've enumerated, at least for a long tour. What are the upsides? As I see them, they are:

1: Better security for the bike during air travel. Not perfect, but not bad. We've flown our BF tandem round trip to and from Europe five times and my NWT has flown twice; in no case has there been airline-induced damage.

2: No additional airline luggage fees. You've already covered that so I needn't expand on it. Parallel: it's easier to find transportation capable of dealing with regular suitcases than with oversize boxes.

3: Better weatherproofing. The trailer's pretty close to watertight, so there's less need to contain things in watertight inner packaging. That in turn makes the daily unpacking and packing tasks simpler by eliminating steps.

4: Simpler packing on a daily basis. Extending the thought above, packing a suitcase is easier than managing panniers because there's less need to fit things in small spaces. True, you can't always get away with the "just heave it all in and slam the lid closed" approach, but I have found that I spend less time trying to reorganize each day.

5: Generally better containment. I've noticed that my panniers seem to "explode" on most evenings, because I've scattered items I need to use throughout the panniers. That in turn means I have two, three, or even all four panniers to reorganize and repack each morning. It's at least nominally easier, or seems so, when everything is coming out of or going into the suitcase. There may be no actual time saving- I've not tried to measure that- but if nothing else it's less mentally challenging. Also, especially when I'm tenting, it keeps the tent tidier because I can chuck stuff into the suitcase and leave it outside the tent.

We don’t ride Bike Fridays but instead ride recumbent trikes. We wrestled with the same question for several years before finding the simplicity of cardboard boxes. In our case, a shorty wardrobe box from u-haul. Fits our folded trikes exactly, in our case, Alaska airlines has never questioned the size and only once questioned the combined 55 pound weight as which time I produced their documentation about bikes flying free, showed them a picture of the folded and assembled trike and then we simply went on.

The cardboard boxes have held up well and we even got 2 round trip flights out of the last set despite the luggage handling issues. When the boxes reach their end, I use the old ones to reinforce a feel day points of the new ones. We haven’t tried this on an overseas trip yet but remain hopeful.

The first time I had Neapolitan pizza (in Naples, 1981), I didn’t like it. It wasn’t anything like what I was used to. Where was the cheese? Now I prefer Neapolitan pizza.

Dodie is agreeing with you, because she says she prefers American style, and she liked this one. Something that strikes me in the photo is the resemblance to a pizza flaw called "Measles Pizza" as described by a well known Italian pizza guy, Enzo Coccia, here at 3:26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV4gegZ7JNU

The claim is that this comes from dough still too cold from the cooler.