Last Day: Clothes, kit and the bike.
Clothes
As always, Rapha cycling clothes are the best. I took one pair of
classic bib shorts
and two tops. A
lightweight one
and a normal
classic one. To be honest, I could have only taken the classic top. You
don't have space for two shorts so you're washing every night and when I got
hot I just undid the top entirely and flapped along in the breeze. I'm
sure there were people who didn't appreciate a topless middle aged man cycling
past their farm but...hey ho.
I rarely wore gloves because they seemed to make my hands more numb and as a
result I have two huge calluses on the heels of my hands.
I wore a helmet naturally and I did take a
casquette (one of those
silly cycling hats). This was useful because (a) it helped in the rain
and (b) it unambiguously marked me out as a total twat when I wore it walking
round Potsdam and Posnań on the rest days.
My wet weather and cold weather gear was...more Rapha! I had the
Rapha Explore Down Jacket which I only used once while waiting for the ferry but there could have
been other times it was required. It weighs practically nothing and
packs down small. My wet weather top was the
Rapha Pro Team Lightweight Jacket and, like the down jacket, it weighs practically nothing. It's
not "breathable" but keeps you dry and quite warm in rain showers.
There's only one true colour for cycling clothes and that's black and,
therefore, all the kit above was black.
I detailed this in the blog but clothes to wear in the evening are a real
issue on trips like this. I had some thin craghopper trousers which were
made out of chemicals and a t-shirt. The "Jack Reacher" approach of just
binning your t-shirt and underpants every few days and buying new ones worked
well. Although the off bike shoes were incredibly ugly and horrible,
they were light and squished down well in the bag.
Carrying the stuff
The blog documented my loathing of the bean-of-doom but, to be honest, it's
probably the best way to carry stuff. Panniers make you look like a
tourist and the saddle mounted bean doesn't add the extra aero drag of
panniers. I just wouldn't buy a Topeak bag again. It turned out to
be a hopeless design and it fell apart. I have some smaller bags from
Restrap and they're well
made so I would probably buy one of their large bags if I were to do this
again.
I also had a
bar bag also made by Rapha. I wasn't sure about the bar bag but it turned
out to be really useful to keep things like glasses or some food or the tools
for the bike. It also had the ziplock bag with my passport, money and
credit cards in it. Ziplock bags are fabulous for this type of trip and
I used them a lot. The bar bag also had an
Apple AirTag hidden in the bag. AirTags are a really smart idea and broadcast
their position if you lose them. I thought if somebody nicked the bike,
it might help to find it.
What I put in my jersey pockets involved a very strict routine. One
thing that you get obsessive about is leaving something behind either in a
hotel or at a stop in a cafe or petrol station. Routine helps to dampen
down the terror of leaving your phone or passport somewhere. Left hand
pocket: headphones. Central pocket: phone in a case with some
money. Right hand pocket: food or tissues. As I cycled away from a
stop, I would pat the three pockets to make sure I had it all.
Ancillary stuff
I took an iPad with a
Smart Keyboard so I could write the blog and do emails. This was a
mistake. Although the iPad only weighed 450g, the keyboard weighed over
500g. That's an extra kilo just to make it a little more convenient to
write 1,500 words every night, and maybe to allow me to read some books in the
evening. In retrospect, just doing it all on the phone and maybe taking
a Kindle would have been a much better approach.
Headphones are absolutely essential on a trip like this and I took a pair of
Airpods. They have a "transparent" mode which helps — a bit — to hear
traffic behind you and they last about three hours on a charge. Over the
trip, I generally stopped for a coffee or to buy some water at least every
three hours so I would take the pods off, stick them in the case for 20
minutes and they'd be fully charged again. Very highly recommended
indeed.
I took a multitool with a chain breaker and didn't use it at all on the trip
but it it essential. I also took 2 CO2 canisters, a pump, two inner
tubes and some tyre levers. I dumped one of the tubes half-way through
and probably could have done with just one CO2 canister. I took a cheap
and very light bike lock with me which I never used -- maybe foolishly.
I took both a front and rear light but never used the front light. The
back light is a flashing one and I used that every day...all day. The
back light was also pretty important in supporting the bean-of-desolation when
it started to fall apart.
I have a multi-region charger which can charge 5 things at once and therefore,
as soon as I got to a hotel, I took it out and charged the phone, the watch,
the headphones, the Garmin and the back light. I once had to use the
iPad as a power charger when my phone ran out of juice but a cheap and light
powerbank would have been a better choice. Making sure everything is
charged is absolutely critical and one does obsess about it a lot.
I took a little bottle of SPF30 suncream for my face and neck but just let my
arms and legs deal with the sun naturally and now I have the strangest tan
lines. There's a brand of clothes washing liquid called Soak which
worked really well so I had a little bottle of that. A toothbrush and a
small travel toothpaste which I replenished from pharmacies along the way
and...SudoCrem. It's not an easy thing to talk about but you really need
to do something..."down there" to avoid any infection which would lead to
saddle sores. Savlon is a popular choice as is cycle specific
preparations. You have to slather the stuff "down there" every morning
and I supplemented this by buying some nappy rash creme in Potsdam which I
used every night before I went to bed. It's not pretty and it's not
sophisticated but it has to be done. This is one thing I will not miss.
All in all when I left I was carrying about 6kgs. With a bit of
foresight, I could have got that down to 4.5kgs by dumping the spare top, the
iPad and an inner tube.
The Bike
I documented the bike in
this post
but, post the ride, I definitely have some thoughts about it.
Everything on the bike performed faultlessly -- see the comment about not
using the multi-tool once. Sand in the gears was a bad moment but I
can't really blame the bike for that. The frame and wheels stood up to
some serious battering on gravel and bumping up and down pavements (and
occasionally into potholes).
The 1x group-set was also fabulous. A wide range of gearing, almost
silent when you're riding along -- ignoring the sand issue and through the
trip the gears didn't need any adjustment at all. I didn't miss having a
big gear to cycle downhill since it always seemed somewhat hairy descending at
speed with a fully laden bike.
Chain lubrication was something I (rightly) worried about. In my normal
riding around Cambridge or Mallorca, I would use "dry" lube and I would oil
the chain every 100 to 150km. On a trip like this, that's just one day
and so you're oiling the chain every day -- and on the days with rain, you're
oiling it after the rain stops. Not a massive problem one would think
but I obviously had no chance to wash the bike during the trip so the chain
and gears picked up huge amounts of grit, dirt, dust and the residue of the
chain oil made everything filthy. I'm sad to say that when I was trying
to get the bike into the bike bag in Warsaw, I did leave some pretty
unpleasant stains on the beautiful Hotel Bristol carpet. Sorry Hotel
Bristol.
I don't think there's much you can do about this. Maybe wiping the drive
chain down with a rag every night might have helped but I'm not sure.
The tubeless tyres were a revelation. Nearly 2,000km and I didn't have
to fix a single puncture. I did get two punctures but they sealed
themselves without me even noticing. I'm not sure that I would be
confident enough to do a big ride like this without a spare inner tube in case
of catastrophic failure but, compared to sitting by the side of the road
fixing a puncture, these tubeless tyres are definitely the future of cycling.
The disc brakes also worked faultlessly. Disc brakes are basically
impossible to adjust or to fix on the road so they're an all-or-nothing
thing. With old fashioned rim brakes, you can probably do something if a
brake stops working or a cable snaps. With hydraulic disks, there's no
roadside option. However, to weigh against that, they work brilliantly
for stopping the bike both in the dry and, more importantly, in the wet.
Finally, on the bike, the one thing that made me pretty confident of the bike
was the fact that I'd built it myself. I knew where every single nut and
bolt was, I knew where every cable went and how to fix just about
anything. If you're thinking of doing a trip like this, you should
probably strip your bike down to the component parts and rebuild it in order
to really understand what's going on.
When I got home, I spent the best part of an afternoon cleaning the bike up
and putting it back together. Unsurprisingly, I love that bike
now.
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