RE: Worst Touring Bike?

The first one... I can't say it was bad, it was just not a touring bike.  
 
My first multi-day tour the summer of 1963 as a 17 year old.  I rode from Mojave, CA, over the mountains to Ventura to play on the beach for a few days.  The bike was a 26 incher with 1 3/4 inch tires.  An off-brand "Tempo" with parts from all over Europe, it was a single speed with coaster brakes, had aluminum rims, long crank arms and the old style typical bike handlebars and a plastic saddle.  I rigged it up with a basket hung on the rear because I hated how floppy it felt on the front where it was designed to be.  I tossed my sleeping bag into the basket and hung a few other things on a (wire?) refrigerator shelf that I had bolted & tied to the left side of the rear wheel.  My canteen was a plastic half gallon bleach bottle.  I didn't even take a tent.  (It was summer, and I lived in t
 he desert.)  I did have my folding GI shovel hung on the side so I could use it to turn over rocks or dig or whatever in case I happened to find a lizard or snake I wanted to catch & it disa
 ppeared into a place that was digable. 
 
I could easily cruise at 10 mph, and spun out at 20 mph, but standing on the long crank arms, my skinny sub-100 pound body could actually grind slowly up pretty steep grades.  I left at about daybreak on Monday.  It was about 40 miles across relatively flat ground from Mojave past Quartz Hill and on up to the base of the Coast Range, where "Johnson's Grade" as we knew it awaited me.  I rode up and up and up, eventually passing a couple of other people pushing their 10 speeds.  I stopped somewhere on the way up to the pass for my lunch of cheese & bread.  The cheese had become somewhat soft and the grease had begun to exude in the heat of the day, but it was still pretty good.  After I crossed the pass, pedalling was much easier, but I ran out of water, and rode for a couple hours on empty.
   I got as far as Piru, a tiny orange picking/packing community 86 miles from home.  I stopped there to use their park to sleep in, and met lots of kids about my age and younger, who just co
 uld not believe I had ridden that far in a single day.  The next day, I rode on to Ventura and spent a couple days just hanging out before going back to spend the night in Piru again.  The next day, I rode as far as Lancaster, where I spent the night about a quarter mile west of Antelope Valley Junior College, camped in the desert.  (it is solid houses there now).  The next day, I was on the bike again about sunup, and was home in time for a second breakfast on Saturday morning.  Meals were what I bought at whatever store I could find on the way, generally consisting of a quart of milk and a can of beans. (except for the first lunch).  It was such a successful tour, I considered riding back to Indiana the next summer to visit old friends and relatives, but that got shelved in favor of mak
 ing money for college.
 
The bike touring dream lay dormant till I retired in 2008, and rode 2,200 miles from Dayton, OH to Wake Forest, NC and back in a loop, visiting friends and relatives along the way.  I started out with an old (mid-late 70s?) Fuji that a friend gave me and I jury rigged with bar end shifters from an old (late 70s?) Nishiki that I had used for my 12 mile commute for the past few years.  When I got about 500 miles to my brother's, he took me to several bike shops to look at new bikes (as a retirement present), pointing to carbon fiber bikes that only weighed 17 pounds and the like... I protested, and he ended up buying me a Trek Portland, which had disk brakes (really like) and 30 speeds (too many gears, I thought) a nice handlebar bag, and a carbon front fork...  No front panniers.  I mounted
  my homemade panniers on the rear rack, and finished the tour on it, but there was one huge problem.  The saddle...  It was absolutely horrible.  It felt nice the first 20 miles, but I rode 
 a little over 100 the first day and hurt every move after 20 miles.  I was terribly sore by the time I got another 100 or so miles to Asheville, where I found a K-Mart and bought a gel saddle cover.  It helped enough that I could at least continue.  When I finished my loop through NC, SC and GA back into TN at my brother's, I took Trek up on the saddle replacement guarantee, and had them refund my brother the price of the saddle.  I put on the old saddle that I started the trip with, and did fine the rest of the trip.
 
So the worst "bike" was actually the bike saddle.  
 

 
                                              ---------->Bill<----------
Do it heartily, as to the Lord
   _o 
_-\<,_ 
(_)/ (_)