It’s a podcast of a different stripe… a folding bike tour podcast! Over the course of 24 hours from August 20-21, 2015 I tackled my oddest of oddball tours… a heavily transit-aided tour from DC to Boston by folding bike. It’s nutty and had specific ground rules:
- Local and regional transit only (no Amtrak, no Bolt Bus)
- A folding bike to connect the dots
- Ultralight setup (no panniers, no tent, limited gear)
- One night of stealth camping (sorry Tim, no campgrounds or hotels this time)
In the immortal words of Joel in Risky Business… “Sometimes you just gotta say ‘What the fuck.’“
Pedalshift Tour Journals Vol. 4: DC to Boston by transit + folding bike – Intro
When I moved back east from Portland to Washington, DC something caught my eye. I forgot how close everything was in the northeast. On the west coast you can go hours between major cities… but on the east coast they feel like they overlap.
And they kind of do. The Bo-Wash corridor is an old term for the nearly constant urban strip that stretches from Boston in the north through New England, New York City, Philadelphia and down to the nation’s capital. It’s Amtrak’s most important route because a train can usually get you from DC to NYC’s city centers faster than you can wait out TSA and get from suburban airports to where you really want to go.
But it was the transit systems that had my attention. If the outer reaches of each city’s transit systems overlapped just enough… couldn’t you take local or regional busses and trains all the way?
The answer is: yes. And I did it in the summer of 2015. It’s neither the fastest, nor the cheapest, not the most efficient way to do it… and I’m still not sure it was actually fun, or more an experiment in sleep deprivation. But I did it. And the story is told in this Tour Journal.
19 episodes in .mp3 format, 1 hour 11 minutes (includes Pedalshift Project 029 wrap-up)
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