I’ve been thinking more about travelling by bike, “bike touring” if you like.  While travelling by foldup bike has its benefits as described by Richard Spence-Thomas (listen to Show #001), it does have its drawbacks, one being  increased wind resistance due to the very upright riding position.

One way around this is to go for a recumbent. These are the bikes that you “lay back” in, rather than “sit on”.  One result is that you are a lot lower to the ground and therefore present less air resistance. This equals more3 speed for less energy.

Because of the low profile characteristic of recumbents, you will often see them with one of those red flouro flags on the top of a 2 metre whippy fibreglass pole, waving around defiantly.  These are there in an attempt to stop any other vehicle (especially large trucks) running them over and having the driver say “doh…..but I didnt see it”. 

Check out the Greenspeed website for a more detaled description of what the bikes look like:

http://www.greenspeed.com.au/

These Greenspeed recumbents are spectacular.  I had the pleasure once of visiting the factory here in Melbourne a year or two ago and was really impressed in the way the operation was run.

While it may be more difficult to pack a recumbent into a suitcase, they certainly do have travelling advantages.  Perhaps a podcast story on recumbent touring would be good…

Doc Martin.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 9:53 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.