A couple months ago we started thinking about doing some bike touring. We were in Europe in August and did some one-day bike rentals - quite enjoyed it (despite the sketchy bikes). We've done multi-day supported road bike rides in the past (Ride the Rockies most notably), so I figured it wouldn't take too much to get used to carrying gear. My first instinct was just to buy a couple inexpensive touring bikes and go for it. Then I started looking into the costs to fly bikes between the U.S. and Europe. It doesn't take but 3 trips and the bike baggage fees will dwarf the cost of a cheap bike.
After some looking about, it appears that the best option (for us, anyway) is bikes with S&S Couplers that allow a bike frame to be split into 2 pieces and the entire bike packed up into a case that an be checked as regular luggage. After looking at some bikes that are sold with couplers installed (which isn't very many), we decided (well, I decided and got reluctant/skeptical agreement from my better half - who has watched a number of projects get stalled only half-finished) to build our tour bikes from components.
As I started down this path, I realized there's a lot of little decisions made along the way, which really should be jotted down in a notebook for future reference. Hence, this blog.
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