What is a Touring Bike?

"Hi! I'm Aaron Phillips for Expert Village and this is choosing the right bike for you. I am sitting here with the touring bike which I just described as a bike that is a great all around bike whether you are commuting in town, looking to have a comfortable posture on the bike with a little bit more speed that you would have on a mountain bike or Hybrid bike. Or if you want to go on an extended tour, you want to go over Europe and do some touring, you want to tour around the United States, this is the kind of bike that you want to be on. It is made for touring. You can adapt to mountain bike for touring but it is better to go with a bike that is designed for it. Like I said, you've got these nice braised kind of holes in the frame that will allow you to put in the attachments for a rack very easily. Right now I've just got the rear rack on this bike. It can be fitted with a front rack as well which is called low rider rack. It allows you to put a set of bags or panures on the front of the bike and get that center of gravity nice and low on the front end so that you don't compromise a lot of your handling when you are out on the road. So you want to think about that on a Touring bike. On the rear, you can attach these bags which are called panures and load this bag up with your extra clothing. You've got a mid layer, got a waterproof layer, you've got a sleeping bag. If you are going to do a tour where you are camping, maybe a tent or part of a tent if you are sharing with your touring partner. You just attach these bags that have a suspension system back here. They vary, across brand. This one is pretty basic. It has a little hook on the bottom that is attached to the bottom of the rack and a couple of hooks up top to attach to the top of the rack and they just lock down which I find is actually really nice on this particular set of panures so they won't fall off. One of the things you want to do when choosing a touring bike, is make sure that the frame is the right size for you. If you get a frame that is too compact and let's say you've got a big shoe big foot, what is going to happen when paddling along your foot can actually hit that bag. So this is an example of a pretty small rear panure that if you are doing a light tour, a very light tour will work just fine for you. There are different kinds of panures, different sizes. These are about the biggest that I've ever seen. These have been used on a cross country tour which I only used this bag. This is all I need to go all the way across the country. You will see that the suspension is a little bit different on this one. The hook on the bottom you use, the tension you use rather than having locking hooks on top, use just this webbing tightening it up so that panure stays on the bike."