The Cycling Brit

Packing for a two week holiday can sometimes be quite a challenge. You either burden yourself with 14 days of clean clothes to lug around in transit, or conjure up in some kind of plan to do laundry in between the more holiday-like activities. Maybe you have your own solution involving the inversion of underwear, but whichever option you go for it will involve some kind of trade-off. If struggling with heavy suitcases and trips to the launderette are not your cup of tea, maybe you’re an underwear inverter?

Packing for an eight month cycling trip requires trade-offs on different order of magnitude. The limitations are obvious – all your earthly belongings will be carried along in bags attached to the bicycle, the more you bring, the heavier and more unwieldy it will become to ride. Everything you need to wear, cook, eat, sleep, entertain yourself, and (hopefully not too often) fix a broken bicycle needs to be distilled down into the smallest size, weight and quantity that is acceptable to your personal needs and tolerance for inconvenience. It is an all out trade-off war and you will be paying the tariff for extra goods in your legs.

The problem with planning something like this for the first time is that you don’t really know what you will find to be an acceptable inconvenience to live without and what will be worth carrying the extra weight. The dizzying amount of choice on offer for how to pack for a major tour can be overwhelming at first. To my knowledge there is no cycle touring Bible, Haynes manual, or other one-stop-shop of ultimate guidance in this regard, so my strategy was to harvest knowledge from experienced and credible sounding folk on YouTube and get started before the options paralysis took hold. Everyone does it their own way, but you soon get a feel for the commonalities between different approaches and where the key trade offs lie.

Anyone who has worked with me will be unsurprised to read that I planned this trip with the help of a spreadsheet, allowing me to track the procurement status of everything I might (or might not) need. So whilst I tried my best to be organised, there were several notable challenges to overcome before the scheduled day of departure: finish work, move house, and partake in a choral performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass. If you can avoid including all three of these activities in the final preparations of your own logistical endeavours, I would recommend it.

I essentially put all tour planning on hold whilst working the notice period of my job, leaving me exactly one month to prepare for the trip, sing the mass, and move out of my flat. Except you can lop a week off the front of that for a bit of decompression time and a family trip down to London. What followed was a maelstrom of researching what gear to bring (or not), internet shopping, farewell drinks, choir rehearsals, vaccinations, furniture donations and bill cancellations. Amongst the chaos I hung onto that spreadsheet for dear life like a tabulated piece of flotsam, keeping my head just about above water as the waves rolled in.

Moving house is a headache regardless of the circumstances. Despite hauling two Transit van loads of ‘stuff’ from my flat in Shrewsbury 200 miles across the Pennines to the family home in Teesside, it was inevitable I would forget to pack something. What surprised me was how many forgotten items came to emerge from forgotten corners of the flat – drawers rarely opened, pictures hung on walls seen so frequently they had become invisible – the bulkier objects would have to go to one of Shrewsbury town centre’s numerous charity shops, but surely there would be spare room in the bags to bring some smaller items home if I called in on the way, wouldn’t there? So despite having no use whatsoever on my trip, a variety of oddball items were placed into the panniers for the initial UK ‘mini-tour’ from Shrewsbury to Teesside. This mini-tour was always going to be my chance to stress test the fully-loaded bicycle setup whilst firmly on British shores; now with extra items to bring along, the touring bike was to become a cargo bike, and a heavy one at that.

The ‘Grand Depart’ was scheduled for Monday the 14th of April, when I would hand in my keys to the flat and set off in the general direction of north-east. The final weekend soon arrived, at which point I was effectively camping in my flat without a bed or more importantly a TV. Our choir, Shrewsbury Choral, performed Bach’s stunning B Minor Mass in the divine setting of Shrewsbury Abbey,  leaving only one major challenge remaining; how would I actually attach this worryingly large pile of stuff – increasing in with every Amazon delivery – onto the bike?

After several rounds of packing, unpacking, swearing, rejigging, discarding, and more swearing, the fully brimmed panniers were finally secured onto the bike, hoorah! Now to just lift the bike downstairs, 3, 2, 1 and lift…I said AND LIFT! To say “that is one heavy-ass bike” would in some sense be anatomically accurate: the majority of weight was held within the rear luggage bags and in particular the large ‘rack bag’ that sits on top of the rear panniers. I would later find out this front/rear weight imbalance can have some rather unpleasant side effects when it comes to actually trying to ride your touring bike.

With the flat keys handed in, and after a brief false start where I had to turn back and collect my trusty old D-lock, I clambered onto the now bulging bicycle and looked up at the white sash windows of a flat that was no longer my home, but just another Georgian building in a historic townscape. I turned on the GPS, gave the bike a small push to get it moving, and started pedalling towards Staffordshire. The mini-tour had begun.