Move

Other than the bike and rider, any self-supported tour requires traveling with a certain amount of luggage. At one end, those who do “credit card” touring pack a minimal amount of belongings and rely on hotels and restaurants for lodging and meals. World travelers take a different approach, loading their bikes up like a moving van in order to have the right item for any situation. Because my ride includes a mix of hotels and camping, I had to find a middle path to handling the load.

The goal was to keep the total baggage weight to thirty pounds or less, so an early decision was sizing the luggage appropriately. Bicycle panniers and bags are measured in liters of capacity, which provides a useful way of comparing the interior volume of different choices. At the low end, a set of two panniers measures 18 liters, or about 1100 cubic inches. If that’s not enough, maximum size tops out at 54 liters per pair, or 3300 cubic inches. Aside from the capacity of the bags, another consideration was their weight. Larger bags obviously weigh more, so keeping the overall mass to under thirty pounds was a tradeoff between essentially useless bag weight and useful capacity.

Because I didn’t want to be chained to the cycling equivalent of ledgers and cash boxes like Dicken’s Jacob Marley, I went with a smaller set of bags from Arkel, a Canadian company with an excellent reputation for quality. With rear panniers, a frame bag and a handlebar bag there’s a total capacity of 2800 cubic inches, or about three grocery bags.

While this might not seem like enough for a journey of several months, the idea of lugging more “Stuff” 4,000 miles across the country over hills and mountains was unappealing. Most stories of other cross-country travelers typically include an account of mailing excess items home after several weeks on the road, a lesson that was not lost on me. I made a list of clothing, equipment and accessories suitable for a summer crossing and started collecting. Eventually, the pile looked like the picture below.

After some trial and error in gear selection, along with a Tetris-style packaging technique, I had a rig that looked like it might just make it to the West Coast without leaving a trail of laundry and bike bits behind. We’ll have to see how that turns out……