Less than three weeks later and I was back home again, two days before the first UK nationwide Covid lockdown started. That winter, a boozy evening in a London pub with an amazing hiking buddy inspired me in a different direction, and 2019 saw me hiking the Continental Divide Trail while Monty languished in the garage at home.īut, come spring of 2020, I was back on track and finally off, starting from Istanbul and pedalling for Mongolia. This bikepacking lark was amazing, and I wanted more, much more. Two months and 2,500 miles east to west across Anatolian Türkiye soon followed. I was constantly amazed at the bike’s ability to get a total noob to off-roading around two-thirds of the UK’s toughest trail with only the occasional unplanned excursion into the scenery. Nothing like jumping at the deep end, right? Six Days and 330 exhausting miles later, I bailed off route and into Ullapool, battered and bruised but totally hooked, and I was soon on the ferry heading west for the Hebridean Way. Ignorance, so it is said, is bliss, so after riding a few hundred easy local trail miles over the first couple of months, I quit my hated boat-building job and took the train to Tyndrum to take on the Highland Trail. Everything else mostly came from two or three big online retailers in Germany back in those glorious pre-Brexit days. I built up Monty in late spring 2018, with the frameset coming from my excellent LBS, Bridgegate Cycles in Retford, and the wheels built by Keep Pedalling in Manchester from parts I supplied. My faith in Logan’s knowledge and experience has repaid a handsome dividend with well over 20,000 trouble-free miles (confession: I’ve had one broken spoke and one flat tyre). I read and reread Logan’s articles on his ECR, so it’s no surprise that Monty bears more than a passing resemblance to that machine. I knew I wanted a Rohloff IGH but little beyond that. I devoured Bikepacking 101, the Gear Indexes, and more besides. Alt bars, frame bags, and going tubeless felt like a brave new world. The realm of off-road riding was a closed book. I had already bought a full set of Ortlieb front and rear panniers and was eying up a Long Haul Trucker with the nebulous idea of cycling around the world floating around in the back of my mind until a Google search for long distance off-road cycling routes brought up the GDMBR and a link to this very website. Back then, I didn’t even know bikepacking was a thing. I had to find a way to escape the traffic and keep riding. A workmate and a diagnosis of high blood pressure got me back into cycling on a Tiagra-equipped supermarket special, followed a year later by another 10-speed: a carbon Scott Cr1 with full Ultegra and, this time around, a knee-saving triple up front.Ī move back to the UK, with its vastly greater traffic density and poor cycling infrastructure, saw me scared stiff on almost every ride. A 10-speed (10 speeds!) Peugeot Record du Monde with steel rims, steel cranks, pretty much steel everything, and a 42/52 up front with a what seemed monstrous 28T cassette out back was the pride and joy of my teenage years until the lure of internal combustion proved too much, and although I remained on two wheels, pedalling was long forgotten.įast forward two and a half decades, and I was living in the roadie’s paradise of Denmark. I might have avoided the death-trap Choppers of my friends, but it wasn’t the metallic blue Grifter that I lusted after. Thanks to a former roadie father, it was followed by a new Raleigh Hustler three-speed racer with drop bars in a decidedly ’70s purple. I imagine my introduction to cycling was fairly typical for the UK born Gen X’er, although I didn’t get my first bike until I was about nine: a hand-me-down rod-pull braked, brush-painted bright orange clunker of a BSA that was probably someone’s Christmas present in the 1950s. I guess you could say I’m an accidental bikepacker where a love of hiking and cycling converged. Hi there, I’m Rob, raised in the North Pennines, a boat builder by trade, and currently based on the Lincs, Notts, Yorks borders. Find photos and read about Rob’s rides around Scotland, Türkiye, Morocco, and more aboard his ECR here… This week’s Reader’s Rig comes from Rob Thwaites in the UK, who offers a thorough look at his Surly ECR with 27.5″ wheels, a Rohloff drivetrain, and several homemade bikepacking bags.
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