How We Prepared for Our First Bike Tour
Here in a few weeks Andrew and I will be going on our very first bike tour! We’ve done a couple overnight trips where we stayed at a hotel – but this will be our first multi day trip and we will be camping! (Bare in mind we’ve only used our camping gear once so far – eek!) With this being our first tour, I thought it might be nice to share how we are prepping for the trip (then later I’ll realize all the things we should have done but didn’t – but live and learn right?)
General Planning-
Our first multi day tour will be the Katy Trail. For those that don’t know, the Katy Trail is the longest recreation “rail to trail” in the United States. It stretches across the state of Missouri, just shy of 240 miles. Due to work schedules, and convenience we will only be riding just shy of 200 miles of the trail from St Charles to Sedalia. If the weather allows it, I do plan to make a quick ride out to the start of the trail in Machens, MO adding another 25 miles (out and back) to our overall length. Because the Katy trail is a favorite destination for a lot of bike riders, their website is full of information. We were able to plan out all of our campsite locations, grocery store, and lunch stops- we’ll see how well it actually plays out!
My biggest concern leading up to our ride is something we can’t really plan for – the weather- more specifically the amount of precipitation. Thanks to the crazy weather the midwest has been experiencing, the Missouri River has been flooding, and the Katy trail basically follows the river, so on top of not wanting to ride in the rain, we can only hope we won’t have to make too many detours off of the trail. I’ve been told riding in the rain isn’t too bad as long as it’s not a torrential downpour, but I have mentally prepared myself for searching for a last minute hotel if the weather doesn’t cooperate for us.
Camping -
As I mentioned before, this will be our 2nd time to break out the camping gear. We managed to squeeze in a “practice camping” last fall where we had borrowed a friends kitchen gear, and tested out our newly purchased tent and sleeping bags. Unluckily for us that particular weekend had been brutally hot and humid – so we ended sleeping ON our sleeping bags instead of IN them. But, overall I’d say the night went well – We did decide that pillows were a must, because crumpled up jackets just weren’t gonna do it so I suppose we did learn something! We were hoping we would get another weekend in to practice camp but from the bike, but the nice weather hasn’t aligned with a weekend so we will be forgoing that practice trip and simply hoping it all works out.
Today we are finishing up our camping preparations by treating our tent and hammock with permethrin. (If you’ve never heard of this stuff you should look it up – it’s basically bug spray for clothes and gear and it lasts like 6 weeks or 6 washes!)
Gear -
Last fall we had also decided to attempt a practice “packing” so we gathered all the stuff we thought we would need/want and quickly realized we did not have enough bag capacity. We had been trying to cram 2 peoples worth of stuff into (4) 15L bags. As we stared at our bags and stuff spread out on the floor we made the executive decision to buy 2 new 35 L (plus outside pockets) waterproof Ortlieb bags – and I’m glad we did! Since receiving those bags we did another “practice pack” and we were easily able to fit everything on the bike! We even managed a practice ride in with the bike fully loaded! Although we quickly learned the cheap tubes we had been buying weren’t going to cut if for the loaded tandem – they were losing pressure on us very quickly! We may or may not get another practice “loaded” ride in before our trip, but hopefully we don’t have any issues there!
Meals -
Andrew’s the cook in our relationship, so he’s been doing a lot of the planning in the meal area. When we had our practice camping trip in the fall, I had chosen some fancy camping meals – which were great- but complicated. Andrew has found us some much simpler meals for our upcoming trip (rice and beans, pasta etc). We made one of the meals just on a regular evening to see how it was – and pretty good, when we factor in exhaustion I’m sure they’ll all be down right delicious, so I think we will be happy with our meals for the trip! We plan to bring with us the more bulk items that would be hard to buy in nice proportions like oil, spices, instant rice, and pasta. But otherwise we plan to stop at grocery stores to buy some fresh produce and maybe some bread if we’re feeling fancy! For our breakfasts, we have already pre portioned servings of oatmeal (with extra goodies like dried fruit and nuts), and of course we’ll be bringing the ever important instant coffee. Rather than cooking for every meal we decided for our lunches we would stop in the towns and order something (that way we don’t have to break out the stove and mess kit for every single meal.) Snack wise we will be bringing several protein bars, some energy chews and GUs (you know the basically straight sugar stuff). We will also have trail mix and granola bars and in the next couple days I will be dehydrating some mushrooms and vegan sausages to give us a more savory snack (as well as some protein!)
Training -
This winter has been especially brutal so we haven’t gotten out nearly as much as we would have liked, but c’est la vie. We made ourselves a general training schedule: Mondays and Thursdays were leg days, Wednesdays were Abs plus a short ride on the trainer. And Saturdays and Sundays we were getting in an hour to an hour and a half of riding on each day on the trainer. As the weather warmed up we’ve been going for longer (2 – 2 ½ hour rides) on the weekends, and we’ve also been able to add in 2-3 days of commuting to work each week for that ever important extra butt conditioning (each of us has about a 6-7 mile commute to work one way, although the commute rides are on our regular bikes instead of the tandem). Hopefully it’s been enough and we won’t be too sore!
Well there’s only so much preparation you can do, so here we go! I’m excited to actually get out and complete our adventure, so the next post I’ll be telling you about is our actual experience so stay tuned!
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