For the fun of it, i'm sharing the fantasy i had on my last tour.

In this thread you can either share your own touring fantasies or you can comment on my dream. I am mainly interested in what you guys think of this project. I am not going to go ahead with it which is why i'm telling you about it.

I spent nearly the whole two months formulating the nooks and crannies of this story.

In a nutshell it is a bike race around the world that isn't actually a race. the more i thought about it, the more i thought that speed should be sacrificed.

So to have a global race when speed is not the point, i had to think of a way for there to be a winner. The idea is then to accumulate points.

The riders accumulated points by doing lots of different things in these broad fields
by doing cultural activities, the more original the better
by doing "hard core" type cycling activities - eg wild camping and cooking for yourself. ie points for wild camping but none of staying in a van park of hostel.
by doing arty things and reporting on and recording your trip in various ways.

In order to keep tabs on everyone and keep cheating out of the picture, all claims for points would be documented and have to pass credibility tests.
all riders would keep a detailed diary
and all claims for points would be emailed.

I wanted to have a big prize something of the order of $50 000 and run the race for anything between 6 months and a year.

How the race would operate would be that riders can go anywhere, design their own route. They wouldn't necessarily all have to leave home on the same date. But this would mean that the end of the race be when a year after the last rider started.

I would have tried to entice competitors with a low entry fee of about $150 but hoped to try to get 1000 entrants.

I think this would be a very fun business model to do. the main challenge would be to get a lot of entrants. So good marketing would be the main business activity. Perhaps the main reason why i decided not go ahead with it, was because i was going ot have to build a website as my first activity and decided i wasn't up to it.

I'm partly sharing this idea now because someone else out there might want to take it up. I worked out many other details but i'm not bothering to note them all down.

Part of the point of the race is to make people push themselves a bit harder whilst on tour. I suppose one could object to that because the beauty of travelling like this is to precisely what you want without any pressure. but then $50 000 would a nice carrot.