I’m sure after this weekend, you are hoping that my phone will die so that I’ll get a new one. That way, the next time we go on a touring trip and are checking for directions… you won’t have to listen to me say “Can I look?” when I get impatient.
All posts by Chris
Bikepacking – Misquamicut Route
Instead of being conservative for our first-ever touring trip, we went all-in with a very aggressive route. We wanted to do something fun, and our first thought was a day on the beach – so we decided to ride to/from Misquamicut State Beach in Westerly, RI. To break up the ride and allow ourselves as much time at the beach as possible on Saturday, we reserved a campsite at Wilderness Lake Campground in Willington, CT for Friday night. The original plan was to leave Hartland around 2pm, but we were late – partly due to work that day, but also because it took us much longer than anticipated to pack everything (and worrying that we were forgetting something). Once we were finally ready to leave the house at 4pm, we weighed our bikes… mine was roughly 83lbs and Rachel’s was 70lbs… next time we’ll distribute the weight more fairly (good for Rachel, bad for me).
Day 1: West Hartland, CT to Willington, CT (~55 miles)
4pm-9:30pm, 30 min rest – 5 hrs riding
Bad aim…
It’s okay, maybe you’ll capture me in the same frame next time 🙂
Gearing up…
Bike Setups:
- Rachel’s
- 2014 Surly Disc Trucker
- Planet Bike ATB Cascadia Fenders
- Blackburn Outpost Front World Touring Rack
- Blackburn Outpost Rear World Touring Rack
- Arkel GT-18 (Front) Panniers
- Arkel Dry-Lites (Rear) Panniers
- Shimano PD-A530 Pedals
- Forté Contour XFC Women’s Saddle
- Chris’s
- 2014 Specialized AWOL Comp
- SKS P50 Chromoplastic Longboard Fenders
- Blackburn Outpost Front World Touring Rack
- Blackburn Outpost Rear World Touring Rack
- Arkel XM-28 (Front) Panniers
- Arkel XM-45 (Rear) Panniers
- Arkel Tailrider Trunk Bag
- Shimano PD-A600 Pedals
Almost ready for practice trips…
Since you left early this morning for the concert, I took that extra time to mess around with getting the racks set up on your bike. As you can see, your tires are very reflective. Overall, I think the racks fit your bike pretty well. I was worried to try to rotate the front one forwards much more, as it might dig into the paint on your fork a little, but I meant to look into that more and never got back to it (in the picture you can see the front rack isn’t quite level). At some point, I need to cut off the extra material on the extenders, but otherwise your bike is pretty much ready for panniers 🙂
I wasn’t planning to put the racks on mine, since I’ll be taking it back to PA this week for road riding but I’m glad I did because I realized there’s not enough space between the skewer and the braze on in front of the drop out to attach the Blackburn Outpost front rack… so I’m going to go for plan B and get an extra long skewer and mount it that way. After noticing this, I also checked the fenders I bought and those didn’t fit either. Anyhow, after checking the racks, I took them back off and hopefully next weekend I’ll have everything I need to get it set up for a trip the weekend of 8/22-8/24 :-).