The Essential Touring Cyclist by Richard A. Lovett

This 160 page book by Richard A. Lovett has been highly recommended by many bicycle tourists over the years as one to read if you are looking for a book to introduce you to bicycle touring.

I remember picking it up myself as a result and preparing for my first tour using this fine book as my guide. The book discusses numerous topics including how to get started, supported, credit card and self-contained touring as well as how to equip yourself and your bike for a successfully bicycle touring adventure.

The book finishes with a section that describes some of the challenges that you might meet during your tour and how you can overcome them as well as a listing of some of the tours that are available for your consideration from around the world.

I've actually read through this book several times over the years and I still enjoy it today, especially those parts where the author discusses events that occurred during his own bicycle touring adventures.

As I've introduced friends to bicycle touring, especially before this web site was available, I would often hand them the book to read for themselves even though I actually own several other introduction to bicycle touring type books. In each case I've received positive feedback from the reader. In most cases they actually ended up buying their own copy of the book later on.

As with all books I have a favourite section in this one too. Chapter Ten is titled "Challenges and Adversities: With proper preparation, both can be fun (almost)" and it's a quite positive chapter that highlights possible problems that you might experience including dealing with hills/mountains, poor visibility due to fog or forest cover, gravel roads, tunnels, desert travel etc. In addition to having a lot of useful information this chapter really highlights how very possible it is to tour a wide variety of terrain with success.

This book was originally written in 1994 with a second edition released in 2001. As a result some of the book is a bit dated when it discusses specific bicycle equipment but in most cases the information contained within is timeless and will likely continue to be relevant for many years in the future.

If you are looking for a book about bicycle touring that's well written, full of good factual information and enjoyable to read then this book is one that I recommend fully and without reservation.

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