1-1-1 2 PACKING TIPS

By Duncan Bennett, Member #4171

Last month Liezel Samuel published an excellent, comprehensive, hypo-minimalist, and near perfect packing list for her and Huw’s epic ride around Australia; 1-2-3 which translated to 1 GS, 2 people, and 3 months. It really got me thinking about my packing list for 1 bike, 1 person, and 1.2 months. Being solo on a bike has huge advantages when it comes to packing; your stuff, where you want it, and no-one can tell you you can’t take it. Disadvantage is that no-one can tell you you can’t take it. Liezel’s list is close to “worst-case” travel, unsupported and camping. The only level below this is remote travel, where servos are few and far between and the RACQ is not a phone call away because you are out of range. Add this to my need to be prepared for every near impossibility due to early solo bike travel in the wilds of WA and the NT where some potentially bad things nearly happened, and the weight can quickly pile up. So the answer for a control freak was a series of spreadsheets, one for overseas, one for domestic fly then ride, one for long riding trips with motels, and one for long riding trips camping. Within each spreadsheet are number of days and drop-down selections, e.g. will it be cold? Select from No, Yes, or Very. Will it rain? Select from Yes, or No. Depending upon the selection, the packing list changes. If going for 2 days it won’t call for 7 pairs of jocks. If very cold the list says you need more items, but less of each because you aren’t sweating. Cold and wet is a real nuisance, although we solved this last year with a small umbrella each. Camping adds a huge amount of stuff, and camping with cooking plus trips with limited fuel available is the ultimate - and this is the story of our 1.2. Like Liezel and Huw, eventually the only room one has to move is to make a smalls sacrifice. Socks and undies can in theory be reduced to 1 of each although this makes doing the laundry a nude activity or in the case of the average bloke, not much bothered with. Temptation can be to make smalls a consumable, or like one bloke we heard about pack all your clothes into week packs and post them out along the route, and carry post paks to send the dirty stuff home. Seriously. We’ve thought about it though.

The Tomavel, or Spaxe® developed for the 1.2. You can laugh like the patent office did, but you’ll be thinking about it when next using an old pooh that looked like a rock to try to bash your tent pegs in, dig a latrine facility with your bare hands, or chop wood with your beaver-like teeth.....