Camping equipment

You don’t need to be equipped to camp out, or to cook your own food, to take a bike tour. However, in rural North Dakota and eastern Montana, it would have been something of a challenge to plan our route so as to hit a town every day with a motel. We also would have eaten much worse on several occasions without the ability to cook ourselves a real meal, since many towns have no restaurant, or have no restaurant that’s capable of making better food than you could with a campstove. Even more unlikely is a grocery store. Needless to say, you also save a lot of money by camping and cooking yourself.

Here’s the camping items we brought and our thoughts about them:

Tent

We used the REI Half-Dome 2, which we wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who is looking for a new tent. That tent kept us snug and dry in a couple vicious rainstorms on the trip. It sleeps two comfortably, and there’s plenty of room under the fly for a couple panniers, shoes, etc. It’s not ultralight, but light enough. The set up is nice and simple, color coded with two colors.

Sleeping bags

We both had REI down bags, rated to 10-15 degrees F. We had the male and female versions respectively, which were great because they actually zip together. Since we left so early in the spring (April 10) and traveled so far north, the warmth was necessary, but summertime tourers needn’t bring anything so hardcore.

Sleeping pads

The inflatable thermal pads we brought on the trip were a new purchase for us, as both of us had previously used Therm-a-Rest Z Lite Sol foldable foam sleeping pads, which are eminently uncomfortable and leave your body covered in marks from the foam bumps. In contrast, the new inflatable pads that are out are a revelation; I slept very comfortably on mine and they were much more durable than older generation of inflatable pads, though Brice’s still eventually sprung a slow leak. I had a Therm-a-Rest ultralight pad that I got on clearance and now seems to be out of manufacture. Too bad, since it’s something I’d definitely recommend. Brice had the REI Stratus, which was negligibly heavier. Halfway or so through the trip, Brice’s pad sprung a slow leak, such that he would wake up after three hours of sleeping and find himself laying on the ground and have to reinflate the thing. The leak wasn’t visible so he couldn’t patch it, but I think despite all that, he’d still prefer it over the old folding foam pads.

Stove/Fuel

We used an MSR Pocket Rocket stove — a tiny little thing that screws on to a pressurized fuel canister. It was small enough to fit inside our cooking pots, with plenty of room to spare. The only potential problem with it is that the flame is relatively exposed, so if it’s windy it take longer to cook unless you rig up a wind block. Overall not a big deal. We didn’t have trouble fuel-wise, either — any outdoors store will carry the fuel canisters and they each last a couple weeks, depending on what size you get and how much you cook, so it will be easy enough to stock up at each opportunity.

A reminder for those who are not starting their bike trip from home: You CANNOT bring fuel canisters on an airplane, ever, even in checked baggage, and you CANNOT bring a stove, either, unless — maybe — you can show that it’s never been used before (i.e., still in its original, sealed packaging). You have to ship them ahead or buy at your destination.

Cookset

We had a couple non-stick MSR backpacking pots. They nested inside each other for storage and had 1 lid between them. We definitely used both pots per meal a lot (e.g., cooking pasta in one and then cooking the sauce in another). We just ate right out of the pots with plastic utensils. Plastic utensils are easy enough to come by and we replaced them once during the trip. By the last night of the trip, the final tine snapped off one of the forks, so I guess we timed it perfectly. The system seemed to work quite well.

Bear bag

We were lucky in that our roll-top Nashbar panniers were raccoon-proof as well as water-proof, so they worked great for food storage for most of the country. (The raccoons noticed when we accidentally had food in our cinch-top Ortlieb panniers.) Once we got to bear country, we had to get a little more hearty of a system. We got some small-diameter woven cord from a climbing-gear shop in Minneapolis and stole one of our friend’s carabiners. Whenever we were camping in a potentially beary spot, we attached all our panniers containing food or toiletries into the ‘biner and hauled it all up a tree. We weren’t staying in many places with bears, but we didn’t have any incidents with this system.