Like the front-rear pannier setup, and agree that front panniers help to balance things: used them on my first four tours.

I used to have Bike Nashbar branded front panniers (and the Nishiki still has a front rack) -- 1980 vintage (my rears are 1980 vintage Cannondales that still have some use left in them) -- but sold them them along with a Cannondale fat frame mountain bike (branded by LL Bean) to a Peace Corp kid in Nairobi after I had finished a tour of Africa in '89 on it (sold the well-worn LLBean-Cannondale for four times what I had spent for it -- it was clearance super markdown at the LL store in Freeport, so I bought two, one for me and the other for the buddy teaching at U. of Nairobi that coaxed me into the ride -- mountain bikes, much less aluminum ones, were super rare in sub-Saharan Africa back then and hit with huge import duties (my friend knew someone at the airport that got the bikes around customs), ergo the large premium, actually had a bidding war for it in the Nairobi regional Peace Corps office, felt bad about how high the price got so threw in the front panniers and my tool roll to the winner. I miss that tool roll.

Lot's of memories when your are only going 12-15mph.

Really appreciate all the advice so far, boy has the technology changed (guessing campy isn't state-of-art any more).

I wanted go full 21st century with the brifters, but maybe late 20th century friction (analog) bar end shifters are a good compromise -- though I thought they'd be $20-40 for a set, not $100+.