Clothing, Gear and Equipment
Resources and Maps
Cycle Touring
Cycling Clothing, Gear and Equipment
Burley Trailers – www.burley.com – known for their trailers, specializing in children’s trailers; have flatbed trailers, trailers for pets, and trailers for touring; have two-wheel models – no single tracks; great quality products and great design; we’ve had 20 years experience with Burley – we took Chelsea from the Oregon border to San Francisco when she was a toddler, and she loved it – and it was an amazingly stress-free bicycling experience considering the weight and "wiggle factor"; we’re taking the Burley Nomad on our 40,000 mile trip.
Terry Bicycles – www.terrybicycles.com – women’s bicycles, with some bike seats (men and women) and Terry specific bike parts; bike tools; bike accessories like gloves; jewelry and gifts; really great women’s cycling clothing – cutting edge in terms of style, fabric and functionality – some of it is like wearable art; reasonable to good prices; we got Terry T-shorts and brought them on a 4300 mile trip without wearing them first, but within a week we dropped all our other shorts and wore only the Terry’s. One of our favorite sites, for sure. You’ll find their products in many retail stores, but the best selection by far is online.
Ground Effect – www.groundeffect.co.nz – we love their attitude – it’s a cycling-only site from New Zealand that specializes in mountain biking; they have products that we haven’t seen anywhere else – like long-sleeve summer jerseys to protect from sunburn, and really great rain gear; we’re hoping to get a product donation, and we’d love to have several of their products on our very short packing list; we’ll report back about our experiences.
Ibex Wear – www.ibexwear.com – wool cycling clothing. Their women’s Serrano long sleeve jersey looks awesome!
Primal Wear – www.primalwear.com – a small but elegant selection of womens sleeveless and short sleeve jerseys, including some with a rock ‘n’ roll theme. There’s a much larger selection of mens jerseys, with many fun and always unique designs.
Specialized – www.specialized.com – home of our beloved women-specific Dolce bicycles; known for great products; prices are fair; it’s pretty easy to find good bike shops that carry Specialized; the owners of every bike shop we went to across the country, who carried Specialized, had bought Dolce bikes for their wives.
Performance Bicycle – www.performancebicycle.com and Bike Nashbar – www.bikenashbar.com – great sites for bike parts and clothing; not a reliably wide selection, but often the best prices you’ll find with closeout items available at great prices; good brand names; especially good if you already know what you want (we got our Camelbaks at really great prices on a closeout, and we have been extremely happy with them, and we got hard-shell bike carrier cases at an excellent price)
Park Tools – www.parktool.com – The Park Tool Company started in the back of a bike shop. Each of the products they developed was designed to meet the needs of the professional mechanic. They were all tested and refined within the confines of a real working bike shop. Their staff has decades of shop experience to draw from when developing their current products for market. We have their Chain Gang chain cleaner with us on tour, and it does a wonderful job cleaning the chains.
Cycling Resources and Maps
Rubel Bike Maps – www.bikemaps.com – does bicycle map routes for the New England region.
Sports Express – www.sportsexpress.com – great prices on shipping oversize sports equipment – and excellent service.
Cycle Touring
Adventure Cycling – www.adventurecycling.org – a truly awesome organization that seeks to promote increased bicycling on all levels; it’s a non-profit that is an outgrowth of the original Bike Centennial in 1976 -a cross-country bike ride celebrating the bicentennial; they now create maps of specific routes, focusing on bicycle enjoyment and safety; their maps are really amazing – we lived with the maps for 3 1/2 months on our cross-country tour, and those maps made a huge difference in our lives; we are using the maps again for our Atlantic and Pacific coast routes; so far they only have the US in bike routes, but they have over 36,000 miles of routes.