OP, if not familiar with gear inches, check out this link, allows you to easily see "gear inches" for a given front and rear tooth combo.

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/gears/index.html

today, with two panniers bike bags on my bike, but with less stuff you would tour with, I saw that my 39 chainring/ 18tooth cassette combo was a very doable "one-gear" of about 60 gear inches (58 actually) On the flat, with a cadence of maybe 80-90 (so easy but not too fast pedalling) I was doing about 22-25 kph (about 15 mph) --a very common, all day long speed.

Your 46/16 is 77 gear inches, effectively 2 gears higher than what I was playing with today. All is fine and dandy on the flats, no load, no headwind etc, but you will see how it is with weight on it going up a hill or with a pain in the keester headwind.