Do you remember the first time?

I seem to be in the middle of a long gap between "real" bike tours right now, my next one probably won't be until around July of next year. Since riding the stretch between Beaudesert and Boonah a couple of months ago (for the first time since my first bike tour in 2000), I've been asking myself what I would have done differently, had I attacked that particular tour with the touring experience I have now. It's no secret that I was naive about a number of things on that initial ride through South Queensland and Northern NSW. Interestingly, however, there probably aren't a lot of things that I would change in hindsight.

I probably would have liked to have done the ride with better equipment. However, given my budget at the time (I had been living technically below the poverty line for a decade), that probably wasn't a realistic possibility. As it was, the tent I was using did it's job, as did the sleeping bag. They were just a bit heavier than newer and more expensive products would have been. The thing that I seemed to lack most of all was confidence. More specifically, the confidence to get right off the beaten track.

This may sound ridiculous, but at the time I actually felt more comfortable riding on the highways than the back roads. After all, I had been commuting on the Gold Coast a number of years by that stage, and I was very confident in dealing with traffic. What I didn't have, was the confidence to deal with some of the rougher terrain in the more remote places I was expecting to find. Of course, subsequent tours (particularly Tasmania) have shown that phobia up to be completely ridiculous, but it's sometimes astonishing what we fear before we conquer it. Most people would probably have a heart attack over that traffic that I ride through each day to get to and from work, yet it doesn't bother me at all.

Sometimes I get a desire to take two weeks and "re-do" the ride. That is, ride to the same destination, only this time using the routes that I would now choose, as opposed to what I chose at that time. There are probably some sections where I would need to use the same route, but I'd still make a lot of changes. That desire is usually tempered by the difficulty in finding the two weeks off. After all, I've now moved on to bigger and better things in cycle touring -- I'll need my vacation time in Scotland next year. On the other hand, the desire to get back to the place where I cut my teeth, the place where I began to realise just what I was capable of, still won't die. Perhaps I've give in to it and go back... one day.