A beginners’ bikepacking adventure

I’ve been a regular cycle commuter in both London and Exeter so am pretty confident on a bike. I’ve also done a fair bit of long distance hiking, so have a fair bit of experience with packing light and managing menstruation on the trail, experience which you would think would translate well to bikepacking. But somehow I’d managed to spend four decades on this planet without combining the two, a situation I’d wanted to rectify ever since reading Gears for Queers in lockdown but never quite had the courage to.

This feels a very unfeminist confession to make but part of this has been due to an enduring fear of bicycle maintenance. I feel I understand enough about my body to prevent too much going wrong with it on a hike and to deal with it if it does whereas I have no similar confidence that a bike won’t maroon me in the middle of nowhere with no idea how to fix it. Another bad feminist admission: when I lived in London my brother used to do my bike maintenance in exchange for a pint, an arrangement that worked very well for both of us while we lived in the same city, until he reneged on the deal by acquiring a wife and family and an adult life while I was still trying to figure out which alcoholic beverages could be frozen into ice lollies. I have tried over the years to remedy this lack of confidence. I attended a local bike maintenance course, took my bike apart and put it back together again and cycled away with a warm feeling of competence. This lasted for slightly less than a kilometre until my chain dropped off rounding a roundabout. I locked my bike up, paid far too much for a taxi home, came back the next day and paid a bike shop £50 to sort it out and never dared try and fix anything on it myself again.

In spite of this I’ve always harboured a secret longing to try longer, more exciting journeys by bike than just to work or the shops. I teach bushcraft and outdoor skills and have always tried to extend my practice of leaving no harmful traces of my presence into my life beyond expeditions, by reducing my material consumption, eating plant-based food and travelling as sustainably as possible. The latter usually means getting a train to as close to a site as possible then hiking if there’s time or getting a taxi if there isn’t. It would be wonderful to be able to replace that taxi with my bike. It would be wonderful too if I could replicate the feeling of freedom I get from walking by travelling under my own power and by a route I plotted, just a little faster. So when my fiancée Charlie spotted couple of women with bikes laden with camping gear crossing the station and mused “If I got a bike we could do that” I think she was a little surprised by how enthusiastically I responded. I was surprised and delighted in turn when a few weeks later she found herself a bike on Facebook marketplace, which we named Persephone to match my bike Theseus (so called because he’s mostly made of parts of other bikes).

An opportunity presented itself when I was booked to teach a foraging walk in Kent and we decided we could fit a little holiday around it. Instead of jumping straight in at the deep end with bike touring we decided we would camp a short distance from Canterbury and cycle there from the station and back. I would then cycle to the walk starting point and and we would explore the local area a bit using the campsite as a base. We signed up for a couple of bike maintenance workshops at Ride On, a wonderful local social enterprise that restores and sells abandoned bikes and teaches maintenance classes. Charlie bought a couple of panniers with an award she had been given with perfect timing at work, and after dithering a bit I bought a top bar bag with a transparent sleeve on top into which I could slot my phone, which proved to be a mistake.

I have two camping modes which I think of as “lightweight” and “luxury” – the lightweight version is the one I take hiking and involves sleeping under a tarp with a lightweight sleeping system, luxury involves a tent, double sleeping bag we can share and an airbed and is the one we take on couple camping trips where we get taxis to and from the station. We had originally planned to get Charlie a lightweight self-inflating sleep mat like the one I take hiking, but when the time came we simply couldn’t afford it so brought a double airbed instead.

Will Cycle has an excellent guide to taking bikes on trains, which it would have been really helpful if I’d discovered it before we went. Instead we booked the tickets and then had to try and contact two different train companies to confirm bike reservations, one of which was only contactable by WhatsApp and one of which sent a standard email back saying that due to high demand they probably wouldn’t get back to us till after our trip (fortunately they did).

The top bar bag I had ordered only arrived before the day we were due to depart, so instead of taking it for a test run I slung my tyre levers and allen keys in there, strapped it on and hoped for the best. (Yes I have tools. Yes I can replace an inner tube. No I haven’t been able to ride afterwards without someone I judge more competent checking it over first. No fears aren’t logical.)

Thursday

Ironically the most bike inaccessible station we encountered on this trip was the one we started out from, in the tiny village where we live on the Barnstaple to Exeter GWR line. There is a fifty or sixty centimetre gap between the height of the platform and the floor of the carriage, and while there is a raised section in the centre of the platform that cuts this gap approximately in half the carriages with spaces for bikes, buggies and wheelchairs tend to be at the ends of the train. It was a struggle to woman-handle both heavily laden bikes on but we managed between us. This gap caused far more problems on the way home though.

Our journey from Exeter to London went relatively smoothly. We got our bike securely bungee’d into the storage spaces which had space for both of them side by side. Although while we were on the train there was an announcement that the train would be cancelled and would terminate early, we’d barely started frantically googling for alternatives before a second announcement was made that it had somehow been uncancelled so no backup plan was necessary. We got off at Waterloo and easily transferred to Waterloo East for our train to Canterbury West.

This leg of the journey ran much less smoothly. We strapped our bikes in and took the fold down seats next to the bike racks, then watched as the train filled up to standing room only. I always feel a bit uncomfortable with a bike on a busy train as the bike space is shared with wheelchair and pushchair users and as they have no choice over how they get around but cyclists do we would potentially have to get off if a wheelchair user needed the space and wheeling a bike past that many people would have been very awkward. I also wanted to keep sitting next to the bikes if at all possible just in case they fell over, but I feel uncomfortable taking a seat when others are standing when I’m visibly young-ish and dressed in cycling gear that is likely to be read as signifying fitness. I know people generally consider cyclists on trains antisocial and I’m always get extremely self-conscious in these situations that everyone is judging me. We actually offered a seat to a woman standing with a cane which she declined, which made me worry even more about the appearance of the situation when she continued standing beside us. To complicate the matter further not all disabilities are visible or consistent. Charlie has fibromyalgia, a dynamic disability that means she can sometimes cycle 10 km in 25 minutes and sometimes be left crying in pain from walking up a hill, and can sometimes really need a seat on a train while not looking like someone who would stereotypically be assumed to. As is so often the case when there isn’t enough of something to go around, rather it’s money, housing or space in hospitals or on public transport, it suits the interests of those who allow the scarcity to continue if we blame one another for taking up too many resources rather than wondering why there aren’t enough.

Our train was then abruptly terminated one stop short of Canterbury West, forcing us to wait on the platform for a hour and a half which wasn’t just frustrating but which pushed us into rush hour which I had tried to avoid when booking. At least I got £4.35 back for the journey through Delay Repay (!).

Getting out of Canterbury West station also proved difficult, as there was only a single wide exit gate for bikes at the far end of the row of gates, and reaching it involved apologising our way through a constant flood of rush hour passengers trying to get onto the platform. I went first, the gap between the gates and the wall was too narrow for that size crowd even without a bike involved and the gate was at right angles to the direction you had to travel to reach it. I turned my handlebars too fast and under the weight of the panniers Theseus fell over awkwardly in the gate with his back wheel blocking the next one. Fortunately in a way I was too busy trying to lift my heavy bike back out of this awkward position to notice what people were saying, but poor Charlie behind me heard a lot of anti cyclist abuse.

Slightly shell-shocked we finally escaped the station and set off. I quickly discovered that cycling with all that camping gear is a very different experience than without – although I’m used to shopping trips with the unbalanced weight of a single pannier bag full of spuds and soy milk, and once foolishly crossed Exeter transporting a medium sized pyracantha in my basket peering out between the leaves, the weight, balance and higher centre of gravity made for a much less steady ride than I’m used to. The height of to holdall on the back was also a bit of an issue – I’m used to getting on my bike by swinging my leg over the back, but unable to do this I was reduced to bending one knee and mounting with an ungainly hop like an inebriated flamingo. To compound the awkwardness the top bar bag I had bought to make it easier to see my phone ended up not having a very sensible fastening system and kept listing to one side of the bar or the other, knocking my knees as I pedalled. After trying to cycle with my legs splayed for a bit, and probably looking like Mr Bean, I gave up and slung in in my basket.

The flaws in the route I had plotted out in advance quickly became apparent. We had already accounted for St Thomas’s Hill and planned to push the bikes up that, but when choosing a route to be traffic free for as much of the distance as possible I hadn’t accounted for the fact that a bike overloaded with camping gear handles very differently from an unladen one. The local woodland trails were an absolute delight on an unladen bike, and Charlie spent most of the time I was working bouncing around them, but were practically impossible to ride with a heavy and awkwardly balanced load so we ended up wheeling the bikes through the woods.

I had booked a Tescos grocery delivery to the campsite, which at the time felt like the height of luxury. I had scheduled it to arrive two hours after I expected us to arrive, which felt like a slightly less sensible decision after our train was delayed over an hour and we spent more of the journey pushing our bikes than riding them. Without mobile reception I was unable to check for delivery time updates, and with the deadline approaching as we pushed our way along the rubble trails of the woods we reluctantly decided that as the faster one I should go on ahead to intercept the delivery while Charlie followed on at her own pace. I have to admit I felt horrible speeding off into the dusk leaving her behind, occasionally glancing over my shoulder in the hope of catching a reassuring glimpse of her light between the trees, though she has repeatedly reassured me she didn’t mind. I made it to the campsite a mere five minutes past the hour, then had enough reception to see that the delivery would be at least another thirty minutes anyway.

Charlie and I were reunited and checked in. Brook Farm Glamping is a lovely small scale campsite with friendly staff, firepits, pet sheep and chickens, exactly the sort of relaxing back-to-basics site that we love. We started getting set up and I left Charlie putting the tent up at the far end of the field (slightly hampered by the fact I had forgotten to put in new torch batteries) while I went to collect the Tescos delivery. I threw everything into the tent to stop it from getting trodden on in the dark while we blew up the air mattress, sorted the bikes out, organised the sleeping bag and liner and started a fire. I swear that when it all went into the tent there was a loaf of bread there. The disappearance of this loaf of bread became the enduring mystery of the trip. We took everything out of the tent in the light on several occasions over the subsequent days without finding it, and I expected it to somehow magically reappear when we took the tent down to leave but it didn’t. I’m not entirely sure how it happened but I can only assume some local birds or a fox or dog had the best day of their life thanks to us.

Friday

The next morning Charlie farted me awake. Before going any further I just want to confirm that I not only have Charlie’s permission to share the following story, I have her express encouragement because it’s hilarious. It turns out the air mattress serves as a sort of resonating chamber and any sound made against it is not only amplified but also echoes in all directions, making a rather starling experience to wake up to.

I recovered from the shock, and Charlie recovered from her laughing fit, and we had breakfast. After years of searching I’ve finally discovered a good plant-based milk powder that makes life much easier when camping, and also having tea at my parent’s house. Charlie meanwhile made a discovery that should be recorded for posterity and added plant-based Chocomel to her muesli.

For someone who can be a bit of a soap-dodger on multi day hikes I have surprisingly strong opinions about campsite showers. There should be at least three hooks, one for your sweaty, muddy clothes, one for your towel and one for your clean, dry clothes. True campsite shower heaven is when there’s also a little shelf to put your glasses on. If you only have a single hook to pile everything onto it all ends up dirty and wet and you probably end up dropping your glasses into a rising tide of other people’s foot fungus, which is what happened here. I’m not singling out Brook Farm here, which to be clear is an extremely lovely campsite in every other regard – single hooks are far more common than not. I’m writing this in the desperate hope someone who runs a campsite reads it and acts on it. Truly I will have accomplished something with my life if even one other camper gets an adequate number of hooks. 

Washed and breakfasted I set out on my bike to scope the route of the foraging walk I’d be leading the next day and find some interesting things to point out. At the last minute I decided to spare my knees and leave the cursed top tube bag at home. This proved to be a mistake – shortly after setting out I became aware of a concerning rattle which I soon tracked down to a loose screw attaching Theseus’s pannier rack to the wheel frame. Having left my spanner and allen keys in the bag back at the campsite there wasn’t a great deal I could do about this, so I resolved to fix it as soon as I got back and of course immediately forgot to do so.

Cycling back I noticed the entrance to another campsite, Rosewood Camping, and decided to check whether they had a campsite shop that might sell torch batteries. Almost immediately on passing through the gate I realised it was a much smaller scale campsite and wouldn’t have one, but by that point I’d been swarmed by a welcoming committee of adorably feral children and before I was able to extricate myself the owner emerged and asked if I was staying. I explained I was looking for batteries but had realised there wasn’t a shop, so he gave me some out of one of the children’s toys and refused to take payment for them. I headed back to our own campsite thinking how lovely it is that mostly we want to help each other out if we can, and remembering one of my favourite poems.

Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile

at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress

to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,

and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. So far

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

Saturday

I hopped on my bike without fixing my pannier rack and rattled off down gravel trails deep into Blean Wood, where I spent the day leading a foraging walk and slow gin making session with Boots on Adventures. By the time I got back to the campsite the screw attaching my pannier rack had worked entirely loose, dropped out, and disappeared to whichever parallel dimension the loaf of bread had ended up in. This provided a valuable lesson in the importance of timely maintenance to avoid bigger issues in the long run, and I will learn nothing from it.

Sunday

I asked around the other cyclists on the campsite to see whether anyone had a spare screw and bolt for my pannier rack. No one did, which did at least made me feel slightly better about my lack of preparedness. Charlie then had the brilliant idea to pinch the screw from her bike’s rear light, as we weren’t planning on cycling in the dark before she would be able to get a replacement.

Business attended to we dragged the air mattress outside and lazed on it. We drank coffee and snacked on delicious vegan brownies from the nearby Arby’s Café and watched the house martins swoop overhead until the threatened rain suddenly materialised and forced us to hastily thrust the mattress back into the tent and dive in after it.

The campsite was a haven for wildlife, with the martins wheeling above us in the day replaced by a nightshift of bats fluttering out of the woodland behind us although unfortunately neither shift of insectivores made much of a dent in the mosquito population that left Charlie’s back a dot-to-dot puzzle of over thirty bites. Wagtails bounced about the paddock and the brook at the bottom of the field, from which the campsite presumably took its name, seemed to be excellent amphibian habitat – heading to the kitchen with our washing up on night I spotted something hopping across our path and instead of saying something intelligent like “Watch where you’re stepping, there’s a toad.” I shouted “Toad! Toad! Toad” which fortunately confused Charlie enough to stop her in her tracks, producing the desired effect. We named the little creature Toadtoadtoad and discovered that he lived in a drainpipe next to the kitchen, then spotted a frog on the way back to the tent too.

Monday

I’m a firm believer that any problem that can’t be fixed by coffee can probably be solved by the application of sufficient bungee cords. Unfortunately it turns out those who live by the bungee cord die by the bungee cord, and as we were wheeling the bikes out of the campsite to head home one got caught around my front axle, bending a spoke slightly and distorting in such a way as to make it very hard to remove. Charlie calmly extracted it while I gibbered a little about the time, and we were finally on our way.

We decided to head back along the roads rather than through the wood, a slightly longer route but a faster one as the gravel tracks really weren’t the best surface for cycling with heavily laden bikes. This took us through the village of Blean where I couldn’t help noticing a lot of signs for the Save The Blean campaign against a proposed new housing development. While I’m sure a lot of the opposition is motivated by genuine ecological concern I did find the number of signs I saw up on paved driveways with oversized kid-killer cars depressing. Part of the reason I teach foraging and bushcraft in the first place is to try and overcome the ecological illiteracy that is so widespread in our society, that nature is something distinct from human lives that needs to be preserved somewhere elsewhere without inconveniencing the way we live our lives here. It’s great to preserve pristine wilderness but we can also try to do a little less damage to the planet in our day to day lives. Seeing those signs on front gardens smothered in concrete made me think of when I tried to get our Exeter street opted out of council weedkiller spraying, an option that can be vetoed by a single household, only to be told by one neighbour “If you like nature so much you should live in the countryside not in the city!” as though the systems that sustain us respect human boundaries.

We coasted into Canterbury with time to spare for a coffee, and I was relieved to discover the station barriers were open this time! After a lovely chat with a bloke on the platform who was interested in building his own bike (we couldn’t help, but admired the shoulder bag he’d made out of his father’s leather jacket) we got out bikes onto the train with minimal difficulty for once. These fleeting moments of connection are one of the things that I love so much about journeying on foot or by bike – unlike cars which isolate everyone to their individual metal boxes it’s very easy to strike up a conversation with a stranger about your surroundings or something interesting one or both of you are likely to be doing.

The train rapidly filled up and we again ended up in the awkward situation of sharing too little space with someone who probably had more claim to it than we did, a woman with an adorable kid in a pushchair. The latter quickly figured out that if she dropped her toys she could make nearby adults pick them up for her in interesting ways, the former told us that the train was so packed because the ones before and after ours had been cancelled.

We made it into Waterloo at last and after stocking up on water, snacks, and M&S cocktails-in-a-can wheeled our bikes into the centre of the concourse to watch for our platform on the departure board. A woman came running up to us saying we looked like campers and offered us a Coleman gas cannister that she wouldn’t be able to take back on the plane with her, a lovely gesture that helped both of us out. Just as with the torch batteries, there is something about travelling under your own power that does seem to bring out kindness between people, a desire to help and share.

The final leg of our train journey back was uneventful until our destination station where we were once again confronted with the huge gap between the carriage and the platform. The aforementioned cocktails-in-a-can may have had something to do with it, but while lifting our heavy bikes down onto the platform we dropped Persephone and the probably because of the extra weight of the panniers this snapped her brake lever off. This cost £40 to fix – I don’t begrudge the price charged, as The Bike Sanctuary in Exeter really is excellent and highly recommended and Denes who runs it is lovely, but I do resent that it needed to be spent in the first place. For cyclists huge steps between platform and train like this can lead to inconvenience and expense, but for people with mobility difficulties they can make public transport completely inaccessible.

Epilogue

So what have I learned from this experience? Firstly and most importantly that weight doesn’t vanish if you carry it on two wheels rather than two legs. Several more experienced cycling friends have looked at the photo of my loaded bike, concealed expressions of horror with varying degrees of success and made suggestions like getting front panniers and a smaller sleeping bag, which I’ll be looking into over winter. The campfire fryups were lovely but the cast iron skillet was definitely a mistake. And while I’m rather proud of myself for having maintained the tent I bought when I was 18 and kept it going for more then two decades, technology has moved on and I was recently gifted a significantly lighter tent by a friend that we’ll be taking next time. Conversely I’ll definitely be bringing more of one thing, and that’s spare parts. I’ve found various gear lists online which I’ll be considering over winter, and more importantly I’ll be trying to do more of my own routine maintenance going forward to get more confident with it. And I’ll also test any new gear out thoroughly before deploying it in anger, and will probably be getting rid of the phone pouch.

Finally the UK rail system really doesn’t work for cyclists. Arguably it doesn’t work particularly well for anyone, but it’s’ particularly sad that it’s so hard to combine arguably the two most sustainable modes of travel when this really doesn’t need to be the case.

The point of taking away these learning points though is that there definitely will be a next time that I’ll be taking them forward to.. Never mind all the sustainability justifications, honestly we just had such a lovely little holiday and had so much fun. Roll on next spring!