I just completed a 31 day bikepacking trip from then very south to the very north of Norway. In total it was 26 cycling days, 5 rest days, 2,900km distance and 35,000m elevation. This is the first time I've done any multi-day cycling trip, so I'm very pleased I made it! In preparation for this trip I spent a bunch of time on this subreddit and other bikepacking sites. I figured I'd share my experience:
I went down the ultra-light no-pannier bikepacking setup and spent around $5k on gear (excluding the bike). From an aerodynamic and weight perspective the setup was great. Other cyclists with panniers couldn't keep up with me on the descents. I also hands down looked cooler than all the pannier folks 😉 From a convenience perspective however I'd rate my setup as pretty low. I spent at minimum 1.5 hours clearing up camp / getting ready each morning, while people I met with panniers would spend 30mins. I'd estimate that I spent an extra 2 hours a day on average compared to pannier folks, and it's not something I got significantly more efficient at throughout the trip. I talked to two others with similar setups to me, and they said tey had a similar experience to me. The main things contributing to this:
- Bikepacking bags need to be stuffed/packed much more carefully since they don't have much structure of their own. If I didn't stuff the saddle bag densely enough, then it firstly wouldn't attach well to the saddle. Same for the handle bar bag.
- Because bikepacking bags (specifically the Apidura ones) don't have any on-bike mounting parts, I had to fiddle a lot to attach the bags.
- It's much harder to get things in and out of bikepacking bags. If I wanted to take anything out of the bags while on the road (eg. rain gear out of my saddle bag), I would have to remove the whole bag, just so I could stuff it compactly again, and then re-attach.
- There is no good place to keep bulky food items (eg. bread, or fruit/veg), so I strapped them to the outside of my bag, which also took time, and was just far less convenient than unrolling a pannier bag. My main use case was picking up dinner at the last shop before camp, where pannier bags can easily expand to accommodate extra items.
- You end up attaching things to the outside of the bags, but that means re-attaching each time you need to grab something from the bag. I attached flipflops, a cup, a banana, and the rear light and each time I packed and unpacked the bag everything needed to be removed/reattached.
- Because of the limited space I had to pack my gear much more carefully and always in the right order, that just took more time.
- Also because of the limited space, I ended up buying more expensive and more fiddly ultra light gear. One pain point was the Big Agnes Fly Creek ultra light tent. It's amazingly light, but the fact that the tent is three pieces (inner and outer tent, plus footprint) and the herrings needed to be in the exact right position for the tent to be taught, meant that I spent a lot of time fiddling with the setup/teardown.
I'll also say that from a ride comfort perspective, having a fully packed 17l saddle bag has a non-negligible amount of momentum/energy, so even if it's attached firmly it easily makes the seat bounce if the road isn't perfectly flat. The split Canyon seat post probably made this a bit more pronounced.
In the end it's a trade off. Panniers have plenty of tradeoffs too. I'm not saying that I wish I'd gone with a full pannier setup, but had I done it again I would have gone for a setup that's maybe slightly heavier/bulkier, but gives me more convenience.
PS: If you're curious, I created a daily video log that I uploaded to YouTube: https://youtube.com/@ChrisOnABicycle
by AsleepPralineCake
3 Comments
Thanks for sharing your experience!
Most of your gear issues would be solved with the read rack and micro-panniers (or even normal panniers) and some kind of waterproof bag on top of the rack.
I know they don’t “look” fast and there is some added drag, but they are way more comfortable to travel.
Oh, now that’s an interesting topic!
On my current bike, I’ve done a few larger trips: One to north cape as well (and back, 2.5 months with ~7000km) with a full pannier setup, after which I’ve invested in a bikepacking setup, with which I’ve done ~1500km through Japan last year, and a week through switzerland from which I’ve just returned.
The last trip (switzerland) in particular was pretty interesting, since my two buddies did have a pannier setup – and I was absolutely expecting to be slowing packing up than them, but I did turn out that we were pretty similar. What made a big difference for me, was that I used a saddle bag (from restrap) and a bar bag (from toppeak) with a harness/pack sack design; you just stuff everything in the sack, strap it into the harness, pull the straps and are ready to got, no need to actually remove the whole bag from your bike or stuff everything while its still on your bike. I actually do have an apidura bar bag as well, but asked my GF if I can borrow her harness toppeak bag for just this reason.
I definitely needed to pack more carefully, like keeping the rain gear at the very front of the saddle bag to make it easy to access, but to a certain extent this is true for panniers as well. For me at least, I got the packing order down pretty fast so, and I don’t think it really slowed me down a lot, but you definitely need to be a lot more organized.
The tent I used in Norway (with panniers) was an absolute nightmare to setup and tear down – its really light, has an incredibly comfortable size (its a 2P tent, for me alone that was pure luxury) and a really good layout – but it easily takes twice as long as the 2P tent we used in Japan, and three times as long as the 1P tent I used in switzerland (which was really easy, but also very cramped) to setup and teardown. This definitely makes a huge difference. I don’t think this is due to being an UL tent tho, since the other two would probably qualify as UL as well (the second with a strong focus on wind stability, so its a little bit smaller). It’s just one more (important!) features of things I’d want from a tent 🙁
I absolutely agree on food being a major problem tho. On my north cape tour, I sometimes bought enough to last me for three days – not really necessary there, but it was nice for staying independent and reducing shopping stops. It was so easy – just stuff everything in the pannier bags and move on. In Japan, during the first big tour with my bikepacking setup, we never needed to buy more than we needed at right this moment – there are convinience stores EVERYWHERE, and they are incredibly convinient – you can buy hot meals, get your morning coffee and everything else basically every 10 minutes. In switzerland, we also did two shopping stops each day – one for lunch, one just before camping for dinner stuff. But there, I often had to ask my buddies to pack most of the things – they just dropped it into their panniers, I would have needed to repack quite a bit (and frankly, I didn’t have all that much free space left anyway). Bikepacking with half full bags does not really work – and if you want to carry lots of food, this makes it really hard.
Finally, speed. I mean, of course bikepacking makes you more aerodynamic (and your are probably a bit lighter as well, since you simply have a bit less storage) – no question there. On the other hand, even with my panniers in Norway I was usually faster than most other bike tourers. I did twice joined up with other guys I met on the road for a few days – and both ran a bikepacking setup. Even in switzerland my two buddies with pannier were pretty close in speed to me with my bikepacking setup, even so I’d say I’m currently the fittest of us. So panniers vs bikepacking may actually make less of a difference at normal travel speeds then you’d think. Maybe you were as fast as you were in Norway mostly not because of your bike, but because you are simply fit 🙂
Anyway, I’m pretty happy with my setup right now, I’ve dialed it in pretty well, even if it did take changing around a few things here and there. If I’d ride to the north cape again (which I’d really love to do), I’d do it with a bikepacking setup!