Old 07-21-15 | 04:03 PM
  #15  
teacherlady
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Joined: Dec 2011
Posts: 98
Likes: 8
From: San Francisco Bay Area

Bikes: Enough

It depends on where you are going, how long you are going for, and how much of a purist you are! What you bring with you is not a simple question. It all depends.

In areas with a good density of bike shops or of bike tourists WITH BIKES LIKE YOURS, you don't need to carry as many spares as you do in the third world. If you are on roads, and are comfortable accepting a ride from a stranger, you don't need to carry as many spares. If the cost of an unrideable tire is a day or two waiting for FEDEX, you don't need a spare tire, but if the nearest decent tire is in another country, you need several boots and a spare tire. If there will be a bike shop in 10 miles, you just need a touring patch kit and maybe one spare tube (two tubes in goathead country), but if the next bike shop is a hundred miles away, carry that patch kit, more spare tubes, plus a lot of extra patches. (16 flats in 4 days, anybody? That's two people, four tires, and there were no repeats from the same puncture. Yes, we'll roll on different tires next time, but better tires were unobtanium. We resorted to Slime, which was displayed prominently in every single bike shop.)

If you are on a heavily traveled ACA route, or perhaps one of the Eurovelo routes, where traveling bike tourists are a regular part of the income stream, you _might_ get charged a significant amount for a onetime use of a too-heavy-to-bring-with tool. Most of our touring has been off those routes, and in most bike shops, the folks went way, way, way out of their way to help tourists. I'm not much of a mechanic, and I've gotten free repairs (that I would have been happy to pay for), discounted parts, and hours of route advice. In any of these shops, if all I needed was 5 minutes with a pedal wrench or a cassette removal tool, they would have given it to me with a smile, and all I would have paid would have been a few more stories told while I worked.

There is no one-size-fits-all-trips tool kit.

Last edited by teacherlady; 07-21-15 at 04:04 PM. Reason: typo
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