Interesting that you managed to do a multi-month tour without a stove and without any spare clothing...Not sure I could do that. Also interesting in this thread is the elimination of the front loading. Now I am a noob at this but it seems that the idea would be to balance the load across the bike and not put it all in the rear, if possible. Is it really better to move the weight to the back, even when you are making the load as light as possible. Here I was thinking about using a HB bag and purchasing a bike that I could use front racks on...even though my goal was to do multi day trips with less than 30 lbs. Guess I need to rethink this strategy and maybe just tour using my CX bike and rear rack.