Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
I see your point, but for me the volume is the issue. My back loaders at 40 liters, front loaders at 25 liters, handlebar bag about 9, that is roughly about 75 liters. I might walk out of a grocery store with 12 to 15 liters of supplies and not all of that will fit into the panniers, need another bag on top.
It depends somewhat on the trip, when I rode the pacific coast, we probably shopped every two or three days so did not have a lot of volume of groceries, but several of my trips have had segments with no grocery stores for a week or more.
I did a trans-Taklamakan tour where I had to carry five gallons of water. That's 20L of volume, 45lb of weight in just water. That was the entirety of two panniers. Third day in we caught a sand storm, but we had to reach our water resupply point that day. Ended up cycling from 9am to 7am the next morning to get there. 22 hours.