For God's sake do not do their rides. I did Tom's Wyoming tour in '97 and it was by far the worst trip I've ever been on. I won't comment on the route (which was horrendous). The tour description said that catering would be furnished by Jim's Bar and Grille (or some such name like that). This gave me the impression that the trip would be professionally catered. Jim was just a friend of his who was currently unemployed. There was rarely enough food for dinners and forget about having seconds. Lunch was a steady stream of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and oreo cookies. There was a lot more disappointment on that trip, but it was a while ago and I've gone thru hypnosis to wipe it from my memory.

I always try to give benefit of the doubt, so maybe he's straightened out his act since then, but to Tom's discredit, he had had a few years to do that before '97. By the way, the tour description said the maximum number of participants was 150. There were 9 others on the trip. And all of them shared my opinion. It sucked.

If you're looking for a fully supported, camping-style bike tour out west, go for Adventure Cycling. I've done 2 Montana tours and 1 Cascades tour. There is no comparison between the 2 organizations. I just hope they've figured out their garbage situation. 250 cyclists leave behind an enourmous amount of paper plates and plastic eating utensils.

Good luck

"My GF (hereby know as ""Claudia"" ;) and I did their Hawaii tour about a year ago. We were supposed to do their Wyoming tour, but it just so happened that we were to leave on September 12 2001. They couldn't refund our money, but let us use it towards any future trip, so we chose the Hawaii one.

When we got to Hilo a few days earlier in order to beat the jet lag, Tom was nice enough to let Claudia use the bike she had rented for her tour during the three or four days prior to the start of the tour itself (their office is in Hilo). I had my own bike with me. The day before the tour started, we got talking with Tom, and asked him how big our group was. Turns out that we were the entire group! Claudia, me, and Tom following us in a minivan. I was very disappointed. I was looking towards doing the tour with a big group, meet some fellow riders, and be able to take off with Claudia on our own every now and then. But it was just the two of us plus our own little pet human for 8 days. After a couple of days, we asked him if he could just drive our luggage from one town to the next, and let us do the rest of ride on our own. That meant no sag wagon in case of emergency and no tourism guide to tells us useless trivia about different locations, but it was a lot more pleasant.

The route was okay. Some parts of it were quite nice, but some were very busy traffic. Yet looking at a map of the big island, I'm not sure if it would be possible to do a loop of the whole island while avoiding the heavy traffic areas.

Joao ""your mileage may vary"" de Souza"