How we roll

How we roll

The gear

Overview

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Favourite luxuries

Cycling is an invitation to go simple and leave all the clutter of everyday life behind. Or in the words of a hippie ‘your possessions weight you down’ (when on an 8% gradient).

That said, life is about those little treats. We learned that from more experienced bikers on our first trip. Oh how we looked up to people like Tony or Gilbert - proper pros, when we were just making things up. Tony carried a feather pillow with him, because he liked to “sleep well” (guess what, Ali now has a proper pillow). And Gilbert liked his burgers, so he carried a full steel frying pan with him over every mountain, so that his burgers would “taste good”. This was at a time when we were debating whether a folding chair was OK to take, or whether we should eat out of plastic frisbees, to save weight (and they can double up as - em - frisbees. We never played frisbee and this anti-luxury was soon displaced with proper plates.

This time, we have the benefit of experience and this is how we spent our precious bag space with indulgences:

Heliox chair
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Heliox chair
  1. The big lesson from our first big trip: a chair is a lot nicer than the ground at the end of a day of cycling. Thanks to our nephew Harry, who is a total outdoor expert, we got these amazingly good Heliox chairs. They pack up small, taking up half of one of my small bags on the front. Light, fast to assemble and comfortable. Full marks. Space well spent.

Travel keyboard
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Travel keyboard

  1. My DIY Ferris keyboard. All this text is written on my mobile phone, but with a proper keyboard. Actually, the Ferris is much better than a normal keyboard, but that is a story for another day (or two - I can go on about this keyboard). This means I don’t need a laptop either - I really didn’t want to carry a laptop. So this item is a net-gain for space, weight and sanity.

  2. Sunglasses. I started out with €20 glasses from a petrol station, after I managed to lose my ‘good ones’ [read ‘stupidly expensive’] just 3 days before setting off. In Basano I walk into a specs shop with every so helpful [read sales savvy] staff. Before you know it, I spent another bunch of money on glasses which adapt to the light level. Frivolous, expensive, but ever so nice and after an unexpected 30% discount, I actually saved a small fortune.

  3. Bike computer: My Garmin Edge 530 is actually for my road bike, but it serves an incredible range of jobs on this trip. Navigation is amazing. All the maps are already on it - no reliance on network connection or paper maps. It is also really helpful on climbs or at the end of long days, when we can answer the “are we nearly there yet” with 10m precision. Then there is the whole data logging. For data nerds like me, that is heaven. Every location, speed, elevation, temperature, time - all is stored, just to re-emerge on our map.

Son dynamo hub
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Son dynamo hub

  1. Dynamo: I had gone a bit cheap on my front hub dynamo, and luckily swapped it out for one Gavin Killip ‘happened to have in his shed’ - a stunningly beautiful and high quality Son hub. It connects to a DC converter under my stem and I can charge up phone, bike computer, lights or even the battery pack as we cycle along. In reality we still scavenge electricity in cafés and other public places to make sure our battery pack has enough backup. Having the dynamo feels fantastically self-sufficient, though.

  2. Chopping board: seems trivial, but we both have a chopping board we use every day. It serves to cut and spread bread and prepare all sorts of other things on. I have gone wooden, Ali found an even lighter and thinner plastic version.

  3. Pillow (half of): This is Ali’s comfort item. Cut in half and still, it takes up half a pannier. But what wouldn’t you do for a good night sleep. Verdict: spacious but light and precious.

Top-travel hacks

Engineers cannot help it - the world needs to be made better and we are here to do it. The best way to make the word better is with small time and process saving gismos, wouldn’t you agree?

Butter box components
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Butter box components
  1. The double butter box: Butter is vital, the world is hot. Not a good combination and a fridge has not made it onto our luxury list yet. Almost as good: the double butter box. This wasn’t even planned. I just bought some clip-shut containers before we set off. Turns out, a block of butter fits perfectly into the smaller. But here comes the amazing thing. Imagine my enthusiasm when I find out on some hot day that the small box fits perfectly inside the bigger one. Now we have an effective thermal barrier between the outside world and our precious butter. One better, put this butter in freezer (where ever you can find one) and it will stay ‘non liquid’ for days. Or better still, fill the cavity with water and freeze that. To perfect this, one needs to find the moment when the water reaches the same temperature as the water and poor it out at that point, to trade the thermal capacity of water for the better insulation of air. Calculations for this optimisation are ongoing. Definitely my #1 hack.
Butter box
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Butter box
Butter box closed
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Butter box closed

  1. Magnets for my mobile phone. On the inside of the flap of my handlebar bag, there sits a ring of 6 strong magnets, which I glued in place. That means anything metal I slap onto that bag sits there securely, including my phone. This way I can just pull it off and take photos while cycling along.

  2. Velcro anything that doesn’t adhere to a magnet can be issues to Velcro treatment. The battery pack sits securely in my handlebar bag, held there—you guessed it—by Velcro. If it needs to come out, just pull. Same with little pouches and separators, keeping everything neat and tidy and rattle free.

  3. Heat shrink: the ends of our bungees are metal and that can rattle. We cannot have that. A sleeve of heat shrink over the end and all is beautiful. On the other end I removed the metal hook altogether and ‘hard-wired’ the bungee to the rack. Weight saving possibly 10g - satisfaction: priceless.

  4. Bags: Things can be difficult to find inside a pannier. They are dark and things disappear to the bottom that makes them hard to recover. Bags to the rescue. We have a great yellow bag for all breakfast things, one for lunch and so on. Everything has its place. Clothes front right, sleeping mats, sheets and chair front right. Food back left, tools, spares and backup stuff back right. The big back bags have more ‘sub-bags’ than the front ones. The exception to the bag rule: the tent. It took me weeks to work out that I waste precious seconds of my life putting poles and pegs into their respective bags. Utterly unnecessary. Roll the poles into the tent, thereby protecting them, and have the 6 pegs rolled in at the end. Presto.

  5. Rags: underrated bits of cloth, old pants, what ever. Insanely helpful in about as many ways as the towel for a Hitch-hiker of the Galaxy. Need to put a chain back on? Do not touch. Use the rag. Touched it after all? Use the rag. Oil on the leg (crazy common). Rag. Mud on the rims? Rag. The rag is so useful, it lives in the outside mesh of my chain side pannier - always ready for action.

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A large part of the fun of travelling is the prep - at least for me. Obsessing over what to pack and what to leave behind, how to minimise weight and yet maintain creature comforts, is a challenge I cannot get enough of.

The bike

Bertwo

Bertwo

Built: May 2025

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Camping gear

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Comfort item number one: the sleeping mat. Therma-rests are expensive, but this is not where to false-economise. After all, we spend more time on the mat than on the bike. The NeoAir Xlite NXT is light (RS: 424g, L: 520g)

Total failure
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Total failure

Update: the smaller one failed dismally. After a few nights the foot end sections popped up with a bang, leaving a big bubble. A few weeks later if failed completely and we had to buy a new one.

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Next is the tent (Wild Country Zephyros Compact). Prices go up as weight goes down. On a bike that is less big a deal than on a hike, but still, we settled for something small, light (1.94kg) and simple. The other KPI is how water proof it is. I will report back when I know, but hope not to have to test that too extensively. On our world trip we had a total of two wet day in an entire year - there, now I jinxed it.

A ground sheet is a versitile item to have. Protects the tent, provides a dry clean place to sit and can serve to cover things and keep them dry. Ours is 180x210cm, comes with peg hooks and weights 357g.

I am not a big fan of sleeping bags. Unless it is very cold, I don’t see the point of turning into a sausage. Proper sheets and a light cover, which can be reinforced with a sleeping bag over the top, if needed - that’ll do. Small tents keep the warmth anyway.

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The gas stove is still the original Primus from 24 years ago (450g). It is simple and robust, but perhaps a bit noisy. That said, there is a Pavlovian effect when turning it off and it suddenly turns quiet, you know food is near - joy. It doubles up to run on Diesel, but while we are in Europe, I hope we won’t need that and stick to gas.

With cutlery we went a bit stingy in the past. Turns out a hot drink is much nicer in a proper mug, and food tastes better with a decent plate and knife, fork and spoon. No compromises here.

Tools

Tools are both essential and a luxury. Taking tools for all eventualities would be far too heavy and should be quite unlikely to come to good use - there - jinxed it again.

The tools
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The tools

Jobs I anticipate and prepare for:

The bits to respond:

Spares

TPU inner tubes make taking spares easy. We have 8 spares, which take up next to no space and add ony 25g each. Unfortunately we have different wheel sizes. Ali 26" and I am on 700C. So we have to have separate spares.

Bags

We still have the complete set of Ortlieb panniers from our trip 24 years ago. What can I say? They are phenomenal, super water proof and ‘unkaputbar’. I also checked with Gilbert, who used a Bob trailer when we cycled with him back in 2001. The verdict is that paniers are best. The only addition is an extra under-saddle bag to avoid strapping too much onto the rack.

Tech

I have a love-hate relationshitp with tech and decided that for travelling less is more. In 2001 we had:

We also had some walkie-talkies, but never used them. It would be fun to travel with exactly this setup again - after all, it served us well and the phone batteries lasted over a month. And we are not far off. The current combo is:

And there are so many new things I considered taking: GoPro, SLR camera, laptop or a drone. In the end I opted for minimalism. The phone does so much now:

Numbers

Do not read. This section is for my own records.

Ali

Max

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