Touring Books

No parent taking their family to the Bay area should be without this comprehensive and honest guide. The author provides straightforward advice, practical tips and warnings in a humorous manner. Using this book made our trip to San Francisco action packed and without mishaps.h

This volume is the English translation of the guide put out by the Touring Club Italiano, so it's designed for Italians who want to explore the historic city of Parma and its province. If that's your destination and you really want to know where to go, then this is the book for you. You'll find everything you need to know about Parma itself as well as the castles, churches and ducal palaces out in the province. Parma is off the beaten tourist track but full of history, art, music, and, of course, great food, and this guides provides the background and details you need to get the most out of your trip. It's compact and contains many maps and itineraries, especially valuable if you are touring by car.

Like other maps in the series, this road map confirms the high degree of quality of the Italian Touring Club's maps. A great help for the traveller.

I've ridden several rides following the book, and I found the milage accurate, the rides interesting, and the cue sheets very easy to use. The maps are separate from the cue sheets in the book, but flipping back and forth was not a problem. I personally found the cue sheets adaquate without the maps, but the maps provide a useful overview. If you're familliar with Jim Parham's other books, his mapping technique, while always good, has gotten better. These maps are really clear. However, on some of the rides, some intersections were too complicated for me to figure out from the map alone. The cue sheets were perfectly clear in these instances. Overall, this book is a model of ride information.

I purchased this book as reference material for a trip to Georgia. It is an absolute requirement for anyone wanting to ride wonderful roads with great scenery. Hats off to the author!

A few years ago, a group of my cycling buds and I decided that we needed to get away from the midwest winter here in Northwest Indiana/Chicago area by planning a cycling vacation in an area that was within a reasonable driving distance and featured decent weather (60+ degrees). I researched the areas that this book covers and we now make our annual trip in late March or early April to the North Central region of Georgia. The book contains biking routes in different towns and cities, so you can plan daily rides that allow you to bike only...no driving needed. Routes leave and return in the same town. A word of warning though...flat roads in the north central areas are hard to come by...foothills of the Appalachians! Whoo hoo!

Make sure to visit Cartecay Bicycle shop in Ellijay, GA. Good people! They will take care of your bike and give advice for local rides. They also have weekend group rides.

Full of great ideas for a host of diverse rides! The author has a voice that reaches out and describes each ride. All rides include a precise description of elevations, views, interests, etc.

As a new resident of Washington D.C., this book, "Short Bike Rides: Washington D.C.," has become for my family an invaluable introduction of the area's numerous bike trails and routes. Each route is introduced with a short synopsis of its main attractions and challenges, followed by precise yet easy to follow directions. The book was obviously well researched.

I've had the pleasure of knowing Howard Stone since I was a kid and there is no one more devoted to Bike Riding in Rhode Island. If you are a Rhode Islander and are taking up Biking or are a Biker moving to our area, this one is really worth picking up.

Scott P. Morin, WebMaster, [e-mail]

This book has 45 tours in 4 areas of Arizona--Northern, White Mountains, Mogollon Rim, and Southern. 136pp. Introductory material on ski history in Arizona, winter hazards, preparing for your tour, ethics and touring, and night skiing. Each tour is covered with a topo map, and is rated by terrain, time, distance, and lists topo maps required. The descriptions describe the route and what you see along the way. Sturdy paper cover. Sadly out of print, but used copies are floating around.

If you've ever wondered how it was to ride those high-wheeled "ordinaries", this book is for you.

I will confess to having yet read only to page 73 of this thick tome, but from that alone I can recommend the book. It is an absolutely fascinating look into not only early-day bicycling, but also early New York City and environs. Bicycling was a totally different thing back then, and the reader is at once horrified and regaled by accounts of the challenges presented the wheelman in those days. Cyclists were held in awe by some, jeered and thrown at by others. Spills on cobblestone streets were frequent, and from those high-wheelers, falls were quite dangerous. I have toured over 15,000 miles by bicycle, but hardly a one presented the challenge this author commonly faced.

Read it as history or as adventure--it doesn't matter. It's a great, one-of-a-kind look into the past by a writer who told his late-1800s story entertainingly, using those wonderfully-competent sentences of the old school, and who believed that "The pleasure of riding alone depends very much on whether or not a man takes good company with him." To read this book is to take his pleasure and make it yours.