I put together a simple ~40mi/65km day trip to test out bike camping! Things went pretty well all things considered, getting out of the city and back is always the hard part in the ol US of A. I really couldn’t have asked for better weather.
Lessons Learned:
34.25 L was just enough water for me to cook with and have on the bike ride to and from the campsite when the weather was nice 75f/25c.- I need a little camping stool, I got 10 ant bites right on my waist line from sitting on the ground while cooking lol.
- Using two rocks to prop of my pan over sticks to cook worked surprisingly well but I should probably get a camp stove just in case things get wet or I camp somewhere sticks aren’t around
- The few miles of gravel road SUCKED. I would not recommend anyone ever do something like this on anything smaller than a 32mm tire
Open Questions:
- What do you do with all of the dew? This time it was easy to put away the tent wet and dry it out at home, but on a multi day trip that wouldn’t be an option at all!
- Do you just deal with everything being wet all of the time?
Nice!
I bring a special cloth (made to dry off dogs) to wipe down the tent before packing it up. It’s super absorbent and I even cut it in two so I can keep one half with my camping gear and the other around the house. I can wipe the whole tent with just wringing it out a few times after full on rain, just for dew you it may even be sufficient with only a super absorbent (scandinavian) dish cloth. Unintuitively you ought to wet and wring those out first to make them more absorbent, that’s not necessary with my dog cloth.
That’s a good idea to bring a small towel or something! I used my shirt that I wore on the way out to wipe off a good chunk of the drew from my bike and bags but it definitely wasn’t absorbant enough to do the whole tent in any reasonable amount of time.