The lure of the open road and the delights of living amongst nature for two days just isn't enough to motivate me to plan an overnight bikepacking ride. How can this be so, I want to go, I'd love to go, but just can't.
The dilemma is a bit of a chicken/egg scenario, what's the point in packing up if I don't know what the weather's going to do, and if the weather forecast is favourable, I haven't packed up my bike. Why haven't I packed up my bike? Well, if I want my whole weekend free to bikepack, then I must do my shopping, laundry, grass cutting and other chores after work. I work Monday to Friday, the last thing I want to do when I get in from work is my chores as well a packing my bike, especially if the weather forecast is looking suspect. So I go nowhere.
I needed to do something about this problem. I spent time thinking about why I just can't organise myself. I concluded there was mainly only one mitigating factor causing my inability to pack and that was that some of my bikepacking gear is used for other leisure activities such as hiking, car camping and mountain biking. Which means my gear was all over the place; some of it was in my car, some in my hiking store, some in my mountain biking backpack and some in my camping boxes. It took hours and hours to assemble it all together, well more like it took my brain hours and hours to get my head around it.
I found a simple solution. Late-pack luggage! Now I have rearranged all my gear so that all multi-discipline items go in my rear Rollpacker and my Backpack. That way, I can service my bike, pack up the front end luggage and when a weather window looks promising, I only have the rear luggage and backpack to pack.
It's been quite a revelation, and it worked well for my latest bikepacking ride and I think I'm at the dawn of a new era for me, an era where I can get out at short notice, and I'm feeling so good about it!
You can check out my latest ride here
Please find below my latest packing list, you can download it to Excel if you'd like to and modify it to suit your own needs.