US Touring Heritage: Wandering Wheels
Just a little reminder that a massive chunk of the current generation’s revival of interest in cycling was caused/helped by a church group of bike tourists.
Wandering Wheels was just about the first organized outfit to put people on ‘cool modern bikes’ and send em on a personal rite of passage.
(Heck they predate Outward Bound, too, I bet.) ….To ride across the US.
They also revived/kept up the time-honored (now greed-devastated) tradition of finding free places to camp en masse. (I’m sure hobo jungles were already on the skids.) They used churches and the cyclists were on a churchy honor code and had to sing and ‘witness’ as they toured. They went thru enuf hard times together that they had plenty of good, real stories, I’m sure.
I think the trail-by-fire method was 100miles a day from the get go.
Remember most of the riders had not trained beforehand and probably didn’t even own ‘road bikes’. —They used Schwinns. SuperSports?
Then the wandering boom of the early 70’s hit. I suppose for the early years it was possible to camp out, low impact, for free. Nowadays there isn’t much public space per se left in America. Everywhere has some sort of commercial/legal body overlooking it and charging for the attendant costs (much of which are legal fees or costs associated with the legal process). Tenters are almost anamolies in many places. $25/nite RV campgrounds have little tenter set-asides of chunk gravel for $15/nite (mostly unused I bet…any tent would have to be set up on adjoining grass).
Maybe we’re just too rich. Obviously, it’s not THAT bad. Those who really want to travel or wander (instead of just posing as consumers of wandering) can solve any puzzle including this one. There are good campgrounds, but they’ll still $-ruin a real traveller. You can always ask to camp on lawns.
Good people are still out there, if they haven’t been scared off by lawyerism.
(“We’d love to let you camp, but liability you know…”)
Nowadays I recall that WW is more mainstream and secular. Maybe even sold off from the church group? Anyone know more? Did it decline as it was?
