Hi thanks for all the lovely replies.

Where I live (Far North Queensland right at the Great Barrier Reef) we have really have no specific riding paths, well we have one but it is only 3km in length and so flat and perfect it would be too easy on this bike I think to even use it once. It runs next to a great pedestrian path that winds from one end of the esplanade to the other.

Thanks for the reference to some books I will have a search for some and have a read.

The bike - Its really lovely to ride, I thought it would be so much harder or perhaps in my mind I had built it up to be because I thought the transition from a mountain bike to it would be so much harder but it just felt so right to me. Unfortunately being such a small and transient town with loads of tourist and short time stayers our local community isn't huge and the LBS seem to be running only training rides for those that can tackle the longer rides all at fairly moderate paces nothing for beginners or a training day to help get you started when I asked they said nothing of the sort is run up here.

Hydration I live in a warm tropical place our temp at the moment is sitting at 27 degrees Celsius and where in the middle of winter and at our lest humid time and the humidity is at 80% today too conversion wise the temp is F - 81ish and in summer I will be looking at temps of 35 Celsius of 95F and humidity of 88-100%. How much fluid should I be in taking with that in mind is their some rule of thumb that I should be working with?

Thanks so much for all the advice I spent hours last night reading through so much information I can wait to get into it more.

We laid out a good training plan to ride from one of beach suburbs to another one north of us and another ride south to another beach in total around 15 - 20km's each to begin with.

Thanks again. DG