Bikepacking – A New Bike Camping Adventure?

Bikepacking? What?

I think they used to call it “cycle touring“. According to bikepacking.net, the short answer is that it’s “backpacking with a bike“.

Why?

As a family, we spend our main holidays camping.  For us five, this means an 8-berth tent with separate bedrooms and lots of home comforts: electricity; a fridge; lighting; a heater; air beds; multiple changes of clothes; body boards; kits; inflatable dinghy…

We love our holidays.  But we’ve been thinking.

If my Other Half and myself want to go somewhere, an 8-berth tent is a bit much. So, we book into a hotel. At more cost than we really need to spend.  If my boy and I want to go exploring and doing some Father-Son bonding without the car, we couldn’t, to put it bluntly.

How?

I picked up a bunch of end-of-season bargains at Go Outdoors and added a few other bits so that we now have a full bikepacking kit.

A special note of thanks goes to Toby, from whose blog I won the panniers, saving us a small fortune.

As well as what you can see here, we’ve got a small gas burner; first aid kit; boy’s sleeping bag; mess tins and we’ll carry some food with us (most likely of the noodles-in-a-pot variety). We’ll head out with multiple thin layers; buffs; gloves and some baby wipes.

When? Where?

I’m kicking myself that the boy & me didn’t go on Saturday night for a dry run. The forecast was for horrible winds so we chickened out. As it happens, it was a warm, dry and fairly calm night. Ah well.

The updated plan is to have a short ride to Hollingworth Lake where there’s a little camp site for our first outing.  Then once we’re sure we’ve got what we need, we can graduate to something a little less organised and a little more wild.

So?

Do you think we’ve forgotten anything important?  I hope not.