Biking, touring style

I'm not a serious biker, I never have been, and now, in the span of 9 months (in which time span I could have a child, eek) I will be preparing to spend the summer biking through Europe. I've been invited by my sibling and zir girlfriend to go with them and two other friends. I'll have just graduated college and my sibling will be in the middle of grad school. All I know is that I need to save money, get a bike, and we'll be taking a train across the country, a boat across the atlantic, and then going to at least amsterdam and copenhagen.

The tricky part here is getting a bike. Seeing as I'm not a serious biker, I don't exactly have the proper bike to be touring with. My first plan was to look on craig's list, because buying a good bike new would cost way too much money. However, the Cleveland craig's list listings are not very extensive in the area of touring bikes. So I did some talking to people and the plan as of right now is for me to build my own bike.

Don't get me wrong, this frightens me just a little bit. I know very little about bikes, and the little I do know I learned last summer while going with my sibling to buy zir bike. So here I am, knowing nothing and attempting to build my own bike. The positives: it will be cheaper than buying a bike in a store, cause I get to use the resources of the bike co-op and order through a bike retailer and I'll be doing all the labor myself. I'll also learn how to put it together, so if anything goes wrong on the trip I can kind of be our mechanic, which is good. Negatives: I do have to put in the work, and in order for me to use the bike co-op's services, I have to put in 10 hours of work throughout the semester.

Still though, I'm getting familiar with the bike co-op, which I'm sad I didn't use more often in my time here at Oberlin and I'll be spending the summer after I graduate with my favorite sibling and other cool people biking through Europe, which is exhilirating and terrifying at the same time.

I'm sure updates will surface on the status of the bike throughout this semester, trials and tribulations, ups and downs, all that stuff, but I'm excited and ready for the challenge.