By the time the Fridays are fixed up, we will have three pairs of ebikes. Just four more and we can locate one pair on each continent! But actually the idea of Bike Friday is to prevent that by being ultra portable.

Steve
This discussion is worth taking to a forum.
I am looking ahead to converting a bike friday or similar because of the low step through but as Kathleen wrote if you go the mid motor option you loose your front derailleur and range of gears.
Is that why you discounted the mid motor option?
Maybe ten years ago a bloke that I rode with installed a front drive motor. At that stage he could not disconnect the cables from the motor and this made a puncture repair more complicated as he had to work around the attached cable. Is this still an issue?
Of course I could spend more of the kids' inheritance and go Rohloff with the mid drive!

It sounds right to me to buy your own bikes rather than rent when you arrive. And optimistic too - it suggests you’ll get more than three tours out of them! On the other hand, if you end up with multiple bikes scattered around the globe - one in Leipzig and one in Malaga for example - maybe it’s not the best model.

The LiGo's are 1.3 pounds each. They are 201 x 74 x 21 mm (whatever that means!). ok, ok, that's 8 inches by 3 inches by .8 inches.

For reference, a Bosch Powerpack 400 battery weighs 5 lb 11 oz. The equivalent in LiGo's would be 5 pounds 3 oz - so a bit lighter, somehow.
On the other hand the LiGo's need to go into a bag, which weighs something.

Very interesting reading, Steve! One day we may have to give in to the siren song of ebikes (we see so many on our rides around town) and this makes the choices very clear. I agree with Dodie - I prefer my own bike that is set up the way I like it! Looking forward to seeing the finished products!

Interesting geekiness there, Grampies.

I put a Tong Shen torque-sensing motor on my trike at the mid-drive. I’m pretty happy with it. At least I was, until my wife bought her own trike with a rear hub drive. She seems to get a lot more power from her 48v drive than I get from my 52v/750w drive. She also gets to keep all 27 of her gears whereas I now have nine. My 11yo trike looks very road-weary compared to her shiny-new trike.

About the throttle: My wife got one, and I say go ahead and get a throttle if you need one. At least in our case, you can’t just switch it into place and go. You have to manually hold it on for however long you need it. That keeps the e-assist different from a motor bike.

Can you tell me the weight of the LiGo batteries?

Looks like a good route. I'll be interested in how it goes when you ride north from Nanaimo - not our particularly favourite ride.

I'll be following this with great interest. Had planned a very similar route going as far north as Naniamo, but life got in the way when we'd intended to do it the beginning of September.

Notice that the web site does not offer the option of a thumbs down. Statistically questionable, but comforting!

Ah yes, Crow and Gate is a mere mile down the Yellow Point Road from our route. Good suggestion!

I'd be making a small detour to the Crow & Gate if I was riding that route.

Looks like a good time.

Steve, my 'heart' was meant to be a thumbs up. (I don't do 'hearts'.)

Thanks for the link to our blog! It caused me to go back and reread it and remind myself of what a great experience that was touring up there. We really do have to go north again.

Well, stranger things have happened than us meeting up over there. One of our candidates for the spring is to go back to Spain when our booking is up in Portland at the first of March. If we go that way we’ll start in Valencia and head west, so we could cross paths.

We are thinking if we go in early February then Shengen will kick us out at the beginning of May. Then three months out tending the garden could put us in Germany in August.

This is pushing it a bit, because then the apples will just fall from our trees and rot. Better to delay it all by a month, but after so long away we are likely to go sooner than later. So that's .. early February .. yeah!