Many of you have heard of a major Unicycle Tour coming up called the Mediterranean Unicycle Tour. 12 unicyclists will start in Ljubljana, Slovenia in mid-June and finish in Aix-en-Provence, France on July 6. We will ride over 1000km in 19 days through 4 countries. You can see detailed information on the route, the riders, training and sponsors on the website.
We are now ready to start taking orders for special MUT T-shirts. Here is a quick and simple page put together by Joe Lind of Compulsion Cycles to take the orders.
The page is setup to collect payments via paypal (account not required). If you need to pay some other way, that’s fine. Just email tshirt - at - mut.unitours.org.
Shirts are being offered in two different colors. ‘Sand’ and ‘Kelly Green’. Tell your friends, tell your parents, tell anyone that might be interested in a tour shirt.
Anyone can order one, but no ‘extra’ shirts will be made. If you don’t order one now, you won’t get one. Orders must be placed by May 7th. That’s only 2.5 weeks away; don’t wait too long, you might forget! Your order will be shipped out to you individually. Expect your shirts by June 1st or sooner.
Why is this event limited to a certain number of riders? It’s still a couple months away so I’m wondering why, apparently, nobody else can register to be part of the ride.
I don’t want to answer for the MUT, but generally, the main considerations for tours like this is booking for accomodation in advance. You can appreciate how difficult it is to book places when you live a long way away and have different timezones/language etc. You need to know how many people to book for many months in advance. Also, the other constraint is the support vehicle- you can’t take much more than 12 people unless you have a second support van+driver, or a bus.
We’ll be opening The Uninam tour shortly though, so if you want to do a tour early next year…let me know.
Ken is exactly correct. We’ve reserved and paid for all lodging and ferry costs up front. This is many thousands of $. We had to have an accurate list of riders months ago to do this. Each person going had to do a qualification ride (actually a pair of rides on consecutive days) - this was back in Aug/Sept last year. Once those are done and the first deposit of $500 is received, the rider is registered. We had a full crew by Sept last year.
We give priority to riders who have gone on previous tours and there are a lot of repeats so it doesn’t open up much. The organizers of MUT are volunteers, not travel professionals and are doing hundreds of hours of work on their own time. It’s not easy but it is rewarding. None of us have been to these places and the internet doesn’t solve all problems. Just yesterday I was calling Croatia for instance. We increased the tour size from 10 to 12 this time but can’t go any higher. As the numbers increase, it gets tougher and tougher finding lodging, organizing the support vehicle, and even doing simple things like going out to dinner.
I’ve gone on several of these tours and they are really awesome. I would love to have 20 or 30 people to share the fun with but that would not work. Instead I hope that us doing these tours inspires other people to organize their own.
One way to have more unitours that can support larger groups is to go on the Grasshopper Adventure tours (Laos, Vietnam, Mongolia…). Jason is a fantastic tour guide, and organizing and running tours is his full time job. He’s also able to hire helpers and have muliple support vehicles.
Supporting his business is one way to ensure that he will run more Unitours. Unfortunately, I think he only runs them in Asia.
