Bike touring: useful equipment and things to leave home
As bike touring newbies, we had not really an idea what we really needed on the road. Sure, we had plenty of experience hiking, but being away for this long, and having way more room than just a backpack made it all different. So here are the things we learned on the way!
Things we really needed
Apart from the obvious items (clothing, sleeping, cooking and tools, see here), of course, we will definitely pack the next time:
- Our foldable bucket. Now there is an item we didn’t know we needed that often, but it was indispensable for hauling water, cleaning our bikes, washing ourselves and doing laundry. This one we got on Ebay; it fits 10 liters and is relatively stable. It also takes up less space than the silicone folding ones, and is indestructable.
- Extra long Allen keys. We have a Multitool that contains all the sizes required for our bikes, BUT we needed an extra long 3mm Allen key to adjust our brake pads. To adjust the inner pads, we had to reach through the spokes and with a normal sized key we could hardly reach it.
- Mosquito head net. As described here, it really kept Julia’s sanity in the Scandinavian mosquito/midges season. As it doesn’t take any space and weighs only 11 gram, it definitely will come for the ride next time.
- Rear-view mirrors. At first we had to laugh a bit. I mean, who has a mirror on their bike, that’s only for old people on E-bikes, right? But it’s so much easier to check your mirror than to turn your head around The Excorcist-style the whole day! Plus Kevin could keep an eye on Julia while she was struggling up a hill.
- Merino wool clothing. We could wear our T-shirts for days on end in a heat wave without smelling foul and it would keep us cool in summer and kept us warm when cold and wet. Definitely worth the investment.
Things we leave at home
Some things we carried with us without hardly using them, taking up precious space.
- Camera. Yes, it makes better pictures, but as 99% of our pictures were taken while riding, we could never be bothered to take it out. We checked after our trip and we took 2 (TWO) pictures with the camera. Our phones were always in reach and the quality is good enough for this blog and our wanna-be influencer Instagram.
- The Aeropress. This contraption does make a decent espresso and normally we are suckers for good coffee. We used it maybe 10 times max, the rest of the time we had Nescafe. Sure, it’s debatable whether that is “real” coffee, but it works and is less of a hassle when camping in the bushes somewhere.
- Julia’s mascara. Used it once. No more comments.
- The app maps.me. Admittedly, not really equipment… We used it for navigation and we love the offline maps. It has a separate function for navigation by bike, which works quite well. Until we were pointed to another app; mapy.cz. This app is also based on OpenStreetMap data, but has more handy features (topography, storing routes and tracking). So we will switch to this app for future travels!
