From California to Alaska by bicycle - an experience words can't describe.

Welcome to my digital logbook of our cycling tour from California to Alaska. Some people wonder why we use the bicycle as means of transportation. But especially on long distances cycling is the most adventureous way to travel across a continent. In times where you can fly around the world in 36 hours, where everybodies life is optimised with respect to time efficiency, travelling on a low pace is the best way to experience far away places. While air travel shrinks the world to a small globalised place, cycling gives you a sense of global scale, the size and variety of this extraordinary planet and the kindness and helpfulness of its people.

The bicycle allows you to travel a few thousand kilometers from one climate zone to another, from one vegetation to a totally different one and while you ride you actually notice the change around you. Something neither a car nor a train can provide. Cycling limits your daily radius. This limitation requires us to find accommodation within this intervals and made us stay in small places we never heard of before. And sometimes these little places provide the biggest surprise. Quite often we found ourselves sitting in totally unknown far off places talking to people sharing their story of life with us. It's the people you meet who make your journey a unique experience.

The limitation a bicycle trip involves does not stop at the daily radius. Also the baggage capacity is limited. So you think twice about what you take with you and reduce your baggage to the essentail things. And when you are absolutely sure that your baggage ist reduced the minimum you run into another cyclist carrying half the baggage you do. Where volume and weight of the luggage is crucial you learn to appreciate the little things in life. 

On a bicycle you are much more exposed to nature than in a closed vehicle. This gives you a strong and unique experience of anything happening around you, from weather phenomena to bear encounter. Sometimes luck just isn't on your side. On our tour we were surprised by cold weather below freezing, hail storms or heat waves. But you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. We had days with strong headwind and gradients above 15% but challenges are what makes bicycle tours interesting. Quite often these are the days most remembered in retrospect.

This website is the digital logbook of our cycling tour from California to Alaska. When planing our cycle route we often find inspiration in other cyclists websites. Maybe these logbook gives you inspiration for your adventure. If you never did a cycling tour before and you think about starting one, there is only one advice we can give you: GO!

You never know how far you can get untill you try.