Touring/Commuting

Touring bicycles (and their first cousins, commuter bikes) are probably the most familiar of the specialty bikes at TTR. We've all been tourists, and many of us have been tourists on bicycles. The local bike club in Greenville, the Greenville Spinners, hosts an annual "Ride to the Beach" which treats its members to the opportunities of a really fun "credit-card tour" from the foothills to the shore each year. Many of the regular customers at Sunshine Cycle have done some pretty adventurous tours to New Zealand, France, South America, the American West, and other interesting destinations.

Most of them will tell you that the choice of bike and the choice of gear often make a BIG difference in the enjoyment and the success of these trips. So that's what the "Touring" part of TTR is about-helping better equip the tourist with good touring equipment and with good advice to make the trip more enjoyable.

One of the things we'll focus on is accessing the knowledge pool of the more experienced touring/commuting types in our biking community and making it available to our customers. There is much to learn...and in a good tour, the bike should be a reliable, trusted tool, not the focus! Focus on the mountain range, the sunset, the vineyards-but not the broken spokes, exhausted brake components, or the cracked pannier rack!

Depending on what your "tour" is, you may already have a suitable bike. For example, most medium-priced road tandems are well-designed for the rigors of touring. Or, some old-school no-suspension mountain bikes can be equipped to be good touring machines. But there's a class of bikes purpose-built for the rigors of touring, and we have these in inventory, along with the gear that is appropriate to your particular exploring interest.

For commuters, a good touring bike, and touring-style components, are the best equipment for allowing one to "ditch the car" and get places by bike, with your "stuff" safely transported with you. We have panniers for laptops, fenders, lights, and all that help build a useful commuter bike.

We offer three lines of conventional touring bikes:

Co-Motion (Nor'Wester and Americano models- thoughtful geometry and painstaking execution in Co-Motion's take on classic design)
Fuji (Touring models - classic geometry CrMo steel touring bikes, just what you'd expect in a rugged and dependable touring bike). We currently keep available sizes from 49 thru 64 the Touring model.
Waterford (Adventure model - custom-sized to you and custom-equipped to your meet your needs)

Our tandem and recumbent lines also include many models suitable for touring. Notably, the Bacchetta Giro 26, the RANS Stratus, and the Optima Lynxx and Orca recumbents are excellent touring bikes.

TTR stocks a very interesting option for the traveling tourist or the commuter who needs to store his bike- the Dahon line of foldable bicycles. As you'll see from a visit to their website, or a trip to our showroom, Dahon has a wide line of serious foldable bicycles that can be used for such bicyling situations as overseas trips, boat-to-shore transport, apartment living, and the like. Take a good look at the Speed TR model for overseas trips, for example. The Tournado is a lugged steel touring bike that breaks down and packs into a suitcase (included)--a great option for overseas travel.

We also stock panniers and other touring-style bags, racks, fenders, lights, etc. (See the Gear section.)

The Co-Motion Americano