Our Kit

One thing we’ve found really useful in planning for this trip is reading other people’s blogs and looking over what choices for kit, luggage, luxuries and equipment they made. So here’s us returning the favour!

A full kit list is here.

The Bikes

Sarah has invested in a brand new bike for the trip – a Kona Sutra 2022.

This bike is designed for exactly our sort of trip. Made of steel, with bomb proof wheels, a Brooks saddle and lots of places for attaching racks and stuff. It’s only downside is its weight which is no bad thing as we know that Matt finds it hard to keep up at the best of times… It looks pretty cool and will (fingers crossed) be super reliable.

Matt is riding his trusty titanium Kinesis Tripster ATRV3 – a bike he built a few years ago as a road bike/gravel bike, with wheels that he can swap between to do both. For this trip it needs to be a bit different. He’s put on front fork racks, a rear rack, a bigger cassette and an easier ‘gravel’ chainset (the front rings) to help on the climbs when loaded up with kit. He’s also got new wheels to cope with the extra weight, with an in-built dynamo to try and keep our devices charged up.

If you’d like to read more about our bikes, Matt did a blog after about 50 days of cycling.

Luggage Choices

We’ve both invested in Ortlieb everything!

Matt has the back roller classics and Sarah the sport rollers (on the back). We’ve both added the large fork bags, as well as a handlebar bag for Sarah (doubling as a handbag).

Matt’s trusty Alpkit frame bag is coming along for the ride, as well as his top tube bag for snacks en route.

Both of us have dry bags on top of our pannier bags for tent (Matt), chairs (yes chairs! Sarah) and waterproofs (easy access for both of us, we are expecting some April showers after all).

Campsite Kit

For cooking stuff, we did a blog about food and campsite cooking here.

To note…

Any items/products we refer to here, or anywhere else on this blog have been purchased by us or given as gifts by friends and family. So if you’re an eagle eyed reader, wondering what to buy yourself, you can rest assured that we’ve bought this stuff because we wanted it or it’s been recommended to us, not because the manufacturer/brand has given it to us for free and is therefore expecting us to say positive things about it!

Let’s hope we do find lots of positives, but we’ll be honest as we go as to what works for us/what doesn’t.