This guest post is by Frazer Goodwin – he’s on Twitter as @FrazerGoodwin and you really should follow him. Frazer is English, but lives in Belgium. Enough from me, I’ll hand over to Frazer now.
Part One
“Aren’t you too old to travel that far on a bike?”
It’s a question I’ve been asked by both friends and family. But I have finally managed to complete a multiday bike ride I’ve been planning for years – a ride from my home in Brussels to my in-laws place in Sweden on an island north of Gothenburg. When I posted that I’d done it on Facebook, a good friend here in Brussels simply responded “Nuts”.
Well, I didn’t get to ride that far at 57years of age by just climbing on the bike and setting off. So this short series about my bikepacking will start with the planning and preparations I undertook before the next post details the trip itself and then a final one will review what I’ve learned and plan to do next…
I have been thinking of riding to the island off the Swedish west coast where my in-laws have a house for a couple of decades. It is after all where my wife and I married more than 20 years ago. I had planned the ride in detail for last year, but the pandemic kyboshed it then. I managed to turn it into a tour of the Netherlands to at least use some of the accommodation I’d already booked. And that trip provided me with a lot of insight about how both my bike-setup and I coped on a multi-day bikepacking trip.