Our Around The World Touring Bicycles (14,000 miles so far!)

We’ve spent the last 16 months touring across the USA and Europe on bicycles we assembled ourselves. This video is a quick technical breakdown of the components and bags we’re using for our trip. This setup has served us well and been relatively maintenance free. We aren’t sponsored by any of the brands we mention in the video.

The overall cost of each bicycle was around $4,500 including all the bags, racks, and components you see in the video. While you can definitely do an around the world bicycle tour on a much cheaper setup, we decided on these bikes because we wanted a reliable and low maintenance build that would hold up for years on rough roads all over the world.

Bicycle gear list below. We’re running a mix of traditional panniers and bikepacking bags.

– 2020 Surly Ogres
– 36h Rohloff Speedhubs
– 36h Son 28 Dynamo hubs
– Ryde Andra 40 rims
– Marathon GT365 29×2.0 tires
– Avid BB7 brakes, 200mm front, 160mm rear
– Sinewave Cycles Beacon headlight/USB charger
– Ergon SMC Core (Andrew) Terry Butterfly Century (Jenny) saddles
– Rogue Panda custom frame bags
– Ortlieb Back Rollers Plus rear panniers
– Bedrock Bags Hermosa front panniers
– Tubus racks
– Planet Bike AL fenders

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Camera Gear:

– Fuji X-T4
– Fujinon 16-80 mm f/4
– Fujinon 23 mm f/2 prime
– GoPro Hero 8 Black
– Rode VideoMic Pro
– Mavic Mini 1 drone

foreign hey everyone I’m Jenny and I’m Andrew and we’ve been on the road for 16 months and about 14 000 miles we are taking a day off in Norway today so we decided it would be a good time to do an in-depth look at our around the world touring bikes we built these bikes to be as durable and low maintenance as possible and we also wanted them to be versatile equally capable on the road and on rough gravel both of our frames are 20 20 Surly ogres and the nice thing about these frames is that you can go from 29 by 2 inch tires on the skinny end and 29 by 2.6 tires on the wide end so we can easily transition between kind of a more road setup which is what we have now to morph a bike packing setup when we want to do rougher gravel roads like we plan to in the Americas later on the wheel set is a really crucial part of any bike touring setup so for our front wheel we have ride Andrea 40 rims with a 36 spoke San 28 Dynamo Hub our front brake is a 200 millimeter Avid bb7 mechanical disc brake we decided on mechanical disc brakes over Rim brakes or hydraulic brakes because they’re good compromise between power and ease of maintenance hydraulic brakes have a lot of stopping power but they need hydraulic fluid to function our brakes have a similar amount of power but only rely on a cable that can be sourced at any bike shop in the world we’ve toured extensively on rim brakes and we found them unreliable in the rain with heavily loaded touring bikes in the rear we’re running a roll-off internally geared Hub with a 160 millimeter Avid bb7 brake so instead of running a derailleur in cassette based system the roll-off shifts internally and is basically maintenance free you have to change the oil and the roll-off every 5000 kilometers or 3 100 miles but other than that the shifting is pretty much Flawless and you don’t have to worry about breaking a derailleur or making any adjustments like that also since the chain is basically in a single speed configuration the chains last a lot longer than they do with a derailleur another advantage of the roll-off is that the single speed style chain setup is less likely to get clogged with mud than a derailleur is there are some disadvantages to using internally geared hubs such as the roll-off while they’re known for being very reliable if something does go wrong with The Hub we would need to ship it to Germany for repairs this would be costly and could put our bikes out of commission for weeks or even months in the end we decided that the benefits of the roll-off outweighed the risks but there are definitely some good arguments to be made for using components that could be replaced anywhere in the world we’ve got tsugino XD 600 cranks with a 34 tooth Surly chain ring and a Shimano Square taper bottom bracket we’ve put 15 000 miles in the chainring and we’re planning to flip it soon we’re using KMC E1 chains and we get about 7000 miles out of them we have a 16 tooth roll-off sprocket giving us a very low gear ratio for pedaling slowly uphill the bearings on the original pedals I had on this bike gave out when we were in Albania so this was the best pair that we could find at a bike shop they are Crank Brothers composite petals and so far they’ve been working great Andrew’s using Shimano Saint petals and they’ve lasted the whole trip we started out the trip with Schwalbe marathon mondials and we got about 13 000 miles out of them and recently we switched to the Schwalbe gt365s because you can find mine dials in stock anywhere and we’ve put about a thousand miles on these so far we have Jones h-bar handlebars with ergon grips that help a lot with wrist pain and numbness and then we have the sine wave Cycles Beacon as our headlamp that is plugged into the Dynamo it has a light switch here and then a USB charger and also a plug that you can plug into an external battery if you’re going like really slow uphill so you still have a light if you’re not generating electricity the only downside is that the beam is basically shaped like a flashlight which is technically illegal in Germany our Dynamo setup allows us to slowly charge a power bank or our phones while riding in order to get a decent amount of power from the Hub we need to be going about 12 miles or 20 kilometers per hour in hilly terrain the Dynamo generates no power while ascending because of the low speed and descending a hill happens too quickly to allow for a sustained amount of charging time the Dynamo works best on flat terrain where you can maintain a moderate rate of speed for an extended period of time it’s tough to calculate how much power we get from our dynamos but at best it’s less than 20 to 30 percent charge on our phones per day to supplement the Dynamo we each carry roughly 30 000 milliamp hours of power Banks enough to charge your phones for about eight to ten days of wild camping we have Avid brake levers a little bell my mascot baby Yoda and here we have the revelate eager’s pocket for small electronics when it starts raining so it’s waterproof this is our phone mount it’s just a generic one off of Amazon but it’s been really reliable despite it being pretty cheap this is the mount for my Garmin bike computer and this is our roll-off shifter over here this is a rock Geist Feed Bag you can fit a Nalgene or some snacks in there and then I have an obeha Negra top two bag and this is my water bladder hose that goes into the Rogue Panda frame bag so I have an MSR four liter Dromedary bag in there along with the tent poles and some spare tubes this Frame bag is cut specifically for the Surly ogre so it fits in there really nicely it’s got this zipper pocket where I store some sunscreen and bike tools it is definitely not waterproof so this pocket does fill up with water which is kind of annoying but it’s still a nice bag overall my front rack is a tubus Duo we have Planet Bike aluminum fenders they’ve worked really well overall but the one downside is that we have to completely take off the rear fender if we need to take our back wheel off if we get a flat or have to do other maintenance I have a whiskey carbon seat post and a Terry butterfly Century saddle I’ve used this saddle for over 30 000 kilometers and it’s been amazing overall sometimes I do still get saddle pain but it’s definitely the most comfortable saddle that I’ve ever used Andrew recently switched to a ergon SMC core from the Brooks B17 and so far he’s really liking it our front paneers are Bedrock bags Hermosa paneers and we got them because they’re really light and they also have a velcro attachment system in the back so we thought that they would rattle less than Orly veneers and we really don’t recommend these paneers too highly because they’re not waterproof at all so if you’re in a heavy downpour you wind up with a puddle of water at the bottom of these bags and it’s really not fun our rear paneers are the ortlieb back roller plus which is made of a Cordura fabric which is lighter than the PVC and we’ve used these for seven years and over 30 000 kilometers and they’re still pretty waterproof mine has a hole in the bottom I think so it does let some water in but overall they’ve been incredible this is the attachment system for the orally rear paneers we added the second hook on the bottom to just help them stay on a little bit better on gravel roads and it looks like they would be subject to Breaking but they’re actually like crazy strong we’ve taken them on a bunch of gravel roads and haven’t had anything break yet [Music]