Summer Rides
Great Rivers Century -- A beautiful Sunday ride in Vermont, June 13.
Ride for Research -- June 25-29, Saranac Lake to Ithaca, 300 miles in 4 days. Requirements: $500 minimum in donations to the American Lung Association.
Bon Ton Roulet -- Jully 20-26, a 350-mile loop from Skaneateles through Aurora, Watkins Glen, Geneva, and lots of other beautiful and somewhat hilly places back to Skaneateles. $450.
The Great Big FANY Ride -- July 20-26, Five Hundred miles Across New York, Niagara Falls to Albany. $200 fee and they carry your gear and arrange campsites. Food on your own.
FLCC Memorial Day Weekend -- May 23-26. Ten or so of us will rent a house near Cooperstown for the long weekend of cycling some of the most beautiful scenery anywhere. $75/person for lodging.
Montreal Velo Festival -- It's a week of bike-related activities including rides for kids, rides at night, and general cycling mayhem capped by the Toure de l'Ile around Montreal Island with over 30,000 participants. I'm going up for the last couple days of it.
The Grand Tour -- An annual bike tour put on by Velo Quebec. This year it goes most of the way around the Gaspe Peninsula. It's actually 8 days of cycling; they provide campgrounds and all meals. 40-70 miles/day. $600 CAN = ~$450 US. I'd sure love to have some company driving out to the start of this one.
Touring
"Touring" is a bit ambiguous among cyclists. On one hand, we use it in opposition to "racing" --- rides that are not competitive, that don't hurry past pleasant views, that seize opportunities to have coffee and conversation are usually referred to as tours. A second sense of "touring" is the extended trip, usually for several days. Such trips may include carrying all supplies for camping overnight ("self-supported touring"); carrying only daily necessities and having a support team transport one's camping gear and other belongings to each day's destination ("supported touring"); or they may involve carrying only the credit card that can be used to acquire all the other necessities. The FLCC has devotees of each type of touring. The Sunday ride is a weekly tour of the not-a-race kind and each year members of the club go on longer trips, singly or in groups.
The club has evolved a repertoire of routes for its Sunday tours and in the past few years we've begun to create maps and cue sheets for them. This was begun by Phil Davis when he was the club's touring veep for several years. More recently it has been carried into the computer age with digitized maps that can be seen on and downloaded from the Web. I keep having the hallucination that this job will be finished and require no more sitting at the computer during good riding weather. But there seems always to be a backlog of corrections as well as new rides to be defined, mapped, and put on the web. Please excuse the mess. If there is specific information you need, please contact me or another club member.
Club Trips
Summer Tour --- I'd like to pull together some company for a tour of a week in the middle of August. It will be in the region where Maine, New Hampshire and Quebec converge. Get in touch if it's interesting to you.
Andrejs Ozolins
2002 Touring VP
607 592 0780