August is at hand. It is the high season for bike touring along the Pacific Coast. I’m nicely booked for the month and thought I’d take a moment to pass along some last minute bit of advice for people setting out on their first substantial tour.

My advice is to get a brand new pair of the fattest tires your bike will take. The absolute, and I mean _absolute_ minimum I’d leave home on are 28mm. A better minimum would be 32mm. I only mention 28mm because quite a few bikes can’t fit more than 28mm. And to be sure, those are minimums. Don’t shy away from 42’s or even 50’s if they will fit your bike.

Unfortunately, fat tires have a bad rap. I suspect for two reasons 1) racers ride thin tires, racers must go as fast as possible, ergo thinner tires must be faster*, and 2) most fat tires one is likely to encounter are on cheap department store bikes. Taking them in order, racers ride thin tires because they are weight-obsessives that do what everybody else is doing. If you’re not in first place and are on tires different from everybody else, do you want to be second-guessing that just maybe you could have placed at least one spot higher if you were on different tires? No, it’s not worth the risk. However, touring has nothing in common with racing. The speeds are lower, the loads higher, the roads less predictable, the hours longer. Fat tires are superior on all these counts. And key to going with fat tires are to pay up for a good pair. If you aren’t an expert and aren’t sure what to get, go with Schwalbe. They don’t make a bad tire. Schwalbes won’t come cheap, but they will be worth every penny. You won’t be able to find them in a discount catalogue or in stock at any old suburban strip-mall bike shop. A good bike shop that caters to daily commuters will have a pair. And of course you are reading this on the internet...

As for me, my touring & camping bike sports a pair of 50mm Schwalbe Big Apples. I’ve ridden them up and over the North Cascades Hwy. I’ve also ridden them for very nearly a century, after getting a very late start (about 11:30, I think it was) and going until dark with a full camping load. I run them about 35psi and they roll like a Bentley. And believe me, if you’re going to haul a full camping load a 100 miles in a day, you want to be rolling like a Bentley.

So, there you go. If you haven’t left yet, there’s still time to get yourself a new set of rubber before heading out. You should be heading out on a new set of tires anyway, it’s not worth spoiling a tour with lots of preventable flats.

* In truth, Bicycle Quarterly readers know that fat tires are, in fact, faster than thin tires on real pavement: cracks, pot-holes, gravel, and all.