After a LOT of comparison shopping, V and I finally came to a decision about the bikes that we wanted for our trip. Based on our budget, our choices were pretty limited (there are not very many true "touring" bikes out there for less than $1500), and it came down to either the Trek 520 or the Surly Long Haul Trucker. The Trek is a nice bike, but the Surly has quite a few features (better gearing, for example) that made it a much better option in my mind.
We could have simply bought two stock LHTs, but I decided that it would be much more fun to build one up from scratch. This is probably overly ambitious for me, since I've never built a bike before. However, I'm hoping that the process will make us much more capable of fixing our own problems when we're out on the road next year.
I'll try to post progress on the bike build here--keep in mind that I am in no way an experienced bike mechanic, so my goal isn't to provide detailed instructions for others to follow. However, I will try to provide enough info to make things easier for other beginners like myself.
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