It’s been nearly one year now since I started writing as a guest blogger for America’s largest bicycle touring organization, the Adventure Cycling Association.

I really like writing articles for the ACA because the ACA are the ones that initially taught me so much about bicycle travel. And now, by sharing what I’ve learned over the past ten years of traveling by bike myself, I get to help others both learn about and experience the wonders of bicycle touring.

While I have been blogging on my own website at BicycleTouringPro.com for nearly three years now, the Adventure Cycling Association just celebrated their first year in the blogosphere. To mark the occasion, the ACA posted an article listing their top 10 blog posts of the last year – and one of the articles I wrote for them (an article about how to pack your bicycle panniers) landed at number 8 on the list.

I have one more article to write for the Adventure Cycling Association this year, but I really hope they ask me back to write for them again. I love writing for the organization and I’ve got a whole lot more to share.

This month’s issue of Adventure Monkey magazine features a short article by yours truly. The story is about my cycling exploits in Albania and the lessons I learned there.

To download a free copy of the magazine or order a printed version that can be delivered to your home, just click here.

I was recently interviewed for the May issue of Cycling Utah magazine and asked about my bicycle touring exploits both here in the United States and overseas. Cycling Utah magazine is published online and distributed at bike shops throughout the state.

You can download a free copy of the May 2010 issue by clicking this link. My interview starts on page 30.

A short interview with yours truly has been posted on the carfreeAmerican web blog. The site is intended to inspire people of all ages to to walk, bicycle, and use mass transit for all their transportation/travel needs. Since I’ve been without a car for more than a year-and-a-half now, I guess I’m a good person to talk to when it comes to this particular subject matter.

You can read the full interview by clicking here.

This past Monday (March 1, 2010) I was the featured guest on “The Bicycle Nut” radio show with Jerry Goodwin. For a little over an hour I talked about long-distance bicycle touring, world travel, and my plans for the future of BicycleTouringPro.com.

To listen to the interview, click here and scroll down to the player on the subsequent page.

Photo by C.P. Storm

Every once and a while I will get an email from someone thanking me for the work I have done with Bicycle Touring Pro. In fact, I have an entire page on my site dedicated to the testimonials I have received from my readers. And yet, none of this compares to the single article that some anonymous individual wrote and published about me yesterday.

Click here to view the article.

While the content of the article does contain some factual errors, the overall impression is that I have influenced this person quite significantly… and it is this fact that I am most proud of.

On occasion, I get the feeling that no one totally understands the importance of what it is that I am doing. But when I read a post like this, I realize some people do see the significance of the work I am doing.

In the end, it this kind of content that makes me want to continue my work with Bicycle Touring Pro and make it even better in the future.

In the event that this article is somehow deleted from the blog to which it was origionally posted, I have copied it in its entirely (excluding the photos and embedded videos) below:

We are all influenced by others whether we come to realize it or not.  We all acquire multiple villains and heroes through our lives.  Today I want to talk about one of my heroes.  While I was waiting to publish this article later, my impatience got the better of me.  The man whose story I am about to tell is the main inspiration for my life’s path as well as countless others’ waiting to surface.

Darren Alff is an entrepreneur and traveler.  Like me, he has chosen the bicycle as his way of seeing the world.  In high school, Darren was an avid athlete, running daily as well as playing soccer for the school.  During this time, a movie was released that would lead him to the idea of traveling around the world someday, as well as myself.  The movie was Tom Hank’s best role yet in the hit motion picture, Forrest Gump.  In fact, after its release, Darren was often referred to as ‘Forrest’ or ‘Gump’ due to his infatuation with running.  Now Darren persists that he was never addicted to athleticism, just that running served a purpose for him.

It seems that after finishing grade school, both Darren and I showed reluctance to enter college.  So, at age seventeen, he decided to act out his movie fantasy.  Knowing he couldn’t really run across the United States, Darren decided that he would run from his home in Oregon down to Mexico along the Pacific Coast.  However, his plan didn’t work out as he hoped; deciding that he should make a practice trip, Darren ran a marathon worth for three consecutive days to see what the experience would be like.  After only three days, he couldn’t even walk.

With running out of the picture, Darren received help from an uncle in Ireland who had recently completed a bicycle tour.  He suggested that his nephew do the same since it was less demanding of the body.  Darren took his uncle’s advice.  Again mapping out a route down the California coast, the seventeen year old took his father’s twenty-year-old Schwinn mountain bike out of the garage, strapped the used panniers his uncle lent him, and headed south on his 1,000 mile journey with only $500 in the bank.

As he expected, his savings didn’t last long.  By the trip’s three month mark, he had already spent $300 of his budget.  If you equate that out, this means Darren lived on only $3 a day.  Yet, it was enough for him to complete the trip.  Darren would later complete his next four bike tours within the U.S. living on the same budget.

Since his first tour Darren has completed one trip the past ten years.  During that time he has gone to college and recently made the transition to internet marketing running a consulting website named Silver Mountain Marketing.  On the side he runs two recreational websites, 21bikes.com and bicycletouringpro.com.  The first is a collection of user-submitted pictures involving both bikes and their owners where visitors rank their appearance in one of the twenty-one categories.

The second is a Darren’s attempt in sharing all he knows about bicycle touring.  Launched in 2007, bicycletouringpro.com is a blog oriented website describing how to get started in bicycle touring, how he manages to finance his trips, as well as many other articles containing all the little tips to make your trip one to remember.

Darren has been reported saying that created bicycletouringpro.com to target a younger demographic.  He feels that bike touring is an activity very few people know about, even less among adolescents.  As many twenty-year-olds are going through the transition from childhood to adulthood, these journeys can be a method in which to have fun and reorganize your priorities in life.

Although we haven’t met in person yet, Darren’s life is a great model for my own.  To close this article, I would like to point out two things that Darren has said about touring.  First, for you travelers out there, remember that the “moments don’t happen on the bike”.  And second, when asked what his favorite destinations were Darren wisely said, “My favorite places are those little, random spots that I couldn’t explain how to get back to.  They’re those places when you’re in the moment and it makes you stop and think, ‘Wow…this is really cool.’”

Last week I had the great pleasure of being a guest on the weekly radio show at BicycleRadio.com. On the show we discussed my recent 9-month tour of Europe, my decision to travel with a Bike Friday folding bicycle, stealth camping, travel safety, the way other people view bicycle travelers, the steps needed to escape your normal life and travel abroad for extended periods of time, and my favorite things about bicycle travel.

To listen to the interview for yourself, just head over to BicycleTouringPro.com or check out the podcast from September 21, 2009 at BicycleRadio.com.

Every month Bike Friday sends out an email to their customer list profiling one of the people riding their bicycles. The August 2009 issue of Bike Friday’s “Travel Story Of The Month” featured me, Darren Alff, and my little red folding bike on our 9-month trip through central and eastern Europe.

The piece consists of a long testimonial I wrote for the company about how my Bike Friday New World Tourist has saved me time and time again when traveling on boats and trains in Europe. Additionally, I talk about how the little red folding bike has been able to handle some incredibly rough/diverse terrain and how, while I had never planned on taking the bike on such an extended trip, it has performed far better than I ever expected it to.

To read my feature Bike Friday article, just click here.

An article I wrote about the subject of stealth camping was just published in the latest issue of XSport Magazine.

The August ’09 issue of XSport features pieces on skateboarding, endurance racing, and now… stealth camping!

Click here to download the August issue of XSport Magazine for free and read my article (page 16) about wild camping.

While cycling through Montenegro, I was interviewed by Rick Owens, the director of a web based TV show about bicycling called “CycleNow“. Rick and I connected via Skype and sat down for a few minutes to talk about my  adventures in Europe and beyond.

During the interview Rick asked me:

• How did you first get started with bicycle touring?
• What made you want to come to Europe for such an extended period of time?
• How do you finance your travels?
• Do you worry about your safety when traveling in remote places such as Albania and Kosovo?
• Plus… a whole lot more!

Both parts of the CycleNow interview have been published and are now available for online viewing. To watch, head on over to http://www.cyclenow.us/?p=78