Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
When I went into the middle of Iceland, I think you are talking about me as being one of the "expedition people". I did not want to know how much gear I had for weight. I had a luggage scale but chose not to use it. I think I had two and a half weeks of food on the bike when the photo below was taken. This bike frame is rated for up to 60kg of luggage, not counting weight of rider. I think I did not have that much, but maybe I did? The bike handled the weight fantastically.
The tour I am planning right now would almost exclusively be on pavement and fairly flat. There will be some sections where I need to carry four days of food, but probably no more than that. So, I can travel pretty light. Using the bike in the photo below, but I anticipate that the rack top bag will be nearly empty most of the time.
I like having extra volume available like that big rack top rear bag, if you see the big box of croissants on sale, you have room for it on the bike, it took several days to eat all of them.
When you add up the weight of everything on that bike that says Ortlieb, that is about 8 pounds, just for the panniers and rack top bag.
Nice bikes!
Your setup is typical of what I see with most people touring across the USA, those people I spoke to that had that sort of setup were saying that they were running over the weight I was running with. I have some room to lighten up things, by not carrying as much food like I do, other than that there isn't much I can reduce unless I spend a huge amount of money to buy ultralight stuff, and go minimalized and I just don't see any reason to do that. As things wear out I will replace with lighter stuff, but within reason, I can't justify spending $800 for a ZPacks tent just to save some weight, and that's just one item, by the time I did that sort of thing with all my stuff I would easily be over $4,000 in gear, and I don't know how many years I'm going to be doing this since I'm 70, so by the time my tent wears out I may be done camping like this, I'll see. I also like to camp with some degree of comfort so I don't want to minimalize everything and be uncomfortable camping. I have thicker than normal airpad too because of my lower back fusion, and those lightweight thin sleeping pads don't work for me, so my pad is thicker and thus heavier than others would take. It is what it is.