I strongly recommend a recumbent tricycle for solo touring. I’ve done multi-week cycling trips with my Greenspeed GT3 twice in America and once in New Zealand a

I strongly recommend a recumbent tricycle for solo touring. I’ve done multi-week cycling trips with my Greenspeed GT3 twice in America and once in New Zealand and almost once in Australia. Recumbent trikes are much more convenient for these purposes. I’ve gone from basically not having done any exercise at all for several months to riding ~100km per day, ending up only weary in the legs at the end of each day, not in pain in at least back and crotch as you certainly would be on an upright bike. The inherent stability of a three wheel base means you can load quite heavily without it being in the slightest bit troublesome—you’ll go slower, but won’t have any balance issue. In each of my trips, it hasn’t been just a cycling tour, but I’ve had other gear with me too, as it has become my habit if I’m going to another country for any sort of work or conference to take my trike with me and explore the place thus. My typical load is well in excess of 20kg—panniers on a rear wheel rack, then pile other stuff on top and strap it all down with bungee cords. I have a fairly heavy tarp that I use to wrap the trike up for air travel (it folds in half), and then it serves as a ground sheet for camping. I am firmly convinced that trikes are considerably safer, too; as well as the inherent stability, there’s also visibility, your visibility: you behold the world in front of you readily without needing to crane your neck, and, since you can’t really look over your shoulder due to the posture, you have a mirror that is mounted in such a way that it works well (which isn’t my experience of mirrors on bicycles), so that you can easily keep an eye on what’s coming up, and interact usefully with traffic rather than being blind. The only downsides I’ve really observed are: (a) being lower, you generally can’t see well over guard rails at scenic points on bridges and ocean roads; (b) off-road cycling trails are probably not well-adapted to you (not that this quite stopped me from taking things like the Timber Trail and the Remutaka Trail in NZ last year, though the GT3 specifically is very poorly suited for both with its extremely low clearance on its rear derailleur); and (c) three tracks instead of one generally leads to a rougher ride on very-low-quality surfaces, and more potential for debris punctures (in 2014, on my first cycling tour, I discovered that California in autumn has a particularly virulent type of thorn endemic, and that the slick tyres that the trike came with are eminently unsuitable—I averaged more than one flat per day, where on subsequent trips with Schwalbe Marathon Plus I’ve never had one).