moonlite
Kona Fan
Well, that was extremely fun. My first time ever touring and I already am planning the next one. My setup felt like a pretty mixed bag overall and there's lots of things I want to change. I managed to complete 109km the first day and 129km the second day. Not sure how I didn't notice this before but my rear mech was setup totally wrong and I didn't have access to my smallest cog so I was basically using 3x6! Many situations arose where I needed that extra gearing so it's nice to know it's there for next time.I had no mechanical issues apart from a loose bottle cage but I did manage to crash twice.
On the second day there was about 25km of farm track that had been driven over by big 4x4s in the wet and as a result you got this stripey, alternating (parallel to direction of travel) grass and dry mud. The dry mud was about 20-30cm lower down than the grass verges so if you rode in those your pedals would strike the grass either side of it, but if you rode on the grass it was only about 30-50cm wide and sometimes narrowed to even less. My tires just being BMX tires repetitively slipped down the grass parts into the mud! Pretty minor most times but it happened once on a sweeping downhill left turn and I tumbled pretty hard. Second time was on my way back into London, a Lime bike rider was on his phone and pulled out without looking and hit me. ._.
My route was pretty bad and I put myself through a lot of pain and misery just to avoid roads with cars on them. I ended up ignoring my GPS for certain sections just to get the kms down. Definitely got a lot of planning to do for my bigger trip in summer.
Good job mate -- some serious distance covered . . . and sounds like some serious 'learnings' there ahead of the longer trip!
