Take your wheels along on your next vacation — or rent when you get there — and do some of your touring on bicycle-friendly streets and the many bike trails that are being marked out through urban parks and rural countryside.

Before you go, do some research by wheeling your mouse to a few of the many informative sites available on the Web.

Staying close to home? Washington state — www.wsdot.wa.gov/bike/ — has bike paths and trails all over the place. Look down the page to "Recreation/ Touring" to find tips on taking your bike on the Washington State Ferries or aboard Amtrak's Cascades trains , and the link to "Paths and Trails," where a click on the interactive map will take you to the nearly 200 miles of trails in the Seattle area and beyond. One of Seattle's biggest bicycle clubs, the Cascade Bicycle Club, also has information: www.cascade.org

Heading to the other Washington? Take a break from the museums and monuments in the District of Columbia and visit the Washington Area Bicyclist Association — www.waba.org/new/paths/index.php — for guides and maps to the trails in the district and in neighboring Virginia and Baltimore. Going to George Washington's home at Mount Vernon? There's a trail that will take you there. Try the Capital Crescent Trail for city scenery, and then hit the countryside on the historic C&O Canal Towpath.

In the Upper Midwest, Minneapolis is ringed by the Grand Rounds — www.minneapolisparks.org/grandrounds/home.htm — a chain of 50 miles of biking and hiking trails that pass some of the city's greatest lakes, follow the Mississippi River and take you past the historic downtown Milling District. Check out the various sections for photos, and go to "Information Center" for links to other local information for visitors.

Two wheels also will take you from city out to countryside. Go to the Southeast section of Pennsylvania's extensive Rails-to-Trails system — www.dcnr.state.pa.us/railtrails/ — and click on the Schuylkill River trail, which extends from the outskirts of Philadelphia to Valley Forge National Historical Park. For that and many other trails across the state, look for photos and local Web sites with more information. These trails utilizing abandoned railroad beds are available in many parts of the country including, of course, Seattle's Burke-Gilman trail . The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy — www.railtrails.org/ — has a "Find A Trail" link you can use to locate tracks such as the Grand Canyon Greenway, to use when you visit the canyon, or the Little Econ Greenway near the theme parks at Orlando, Fla.