Cycle Touring Kit — What Actually Works After Six Months on the Road

What you actually pack versus what looks good on a packing list

There's a version of cycle-touring kit that exists purely in spreadsheets and YouTube thumbnail thumbnails — the beautifully colour-coordinated flat lay, the ultralight titanium everything, the sleeping bag that compresses to the size of a tangerine. And then there's what you actually end up using by day four, when you've sweated through a mountain pass in the Ardennes and all you want is your least offensive smelling jersey and a supermarket baguette. This guide is the second kind. I've put a fair few kilometres on loaded bikes across Europe and the gap between "optimised kit list" and "what genuinely earns its place in the pannier" is significant. Some of this I learned the sensible way, by reading. Most of it I learned the stupid way, by hauling a full-size chopping board through northern France for eleven days before admitting defeat.

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The bike

I ride a steel-framed tourer — specifically a Surly Long Haul Trucker — and I'll defend this choice until someone pries the threaded bottom bracket from my cold, tired hands. The argument for a gravel bike is real: they're lighter, they're fast on tarmac, and they look considerably cooler at the café stop. But they also have limited mounting points, sketchy rack compatibility, and a geometry that starts punishing you around hour six of a fully loaded day. E-bikes are having a moment, and I get it — particularly for couples with mismatched fitness levels — but the battery anxiety alone would age me prematurely, and finding a reliable charge in a rural Portuguese farmstay is its own kind of adventure nobody asked for.

Steel has flex. It absorbs road buzz in a way that aluminium simply doesn't, which matters enormously when you're doing eight-hour days across chip-seal surfaces. It's also repairable almost anywhere in the world with a basic welder and a degree of goodwill. The LHT runs 26-inch wheels, which sounds retro until you're in a small town in Romania and realise that 700c touring tyres are a special-order item. Fit a rack front and rear, use proper rack-mounting hardware, and you've got a bike that will outlast several of your life decisions.

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Bags

The bikepacking versus panniers debate is essentially a question of what kind of suffer you prefer. Bikepacking bags — frame bags, seat packs, handlebar rolls — keep weight low and central, look genuinely excellent in photographs, and work brilliantly if you're carrying a light kit and sleeping in hotels. They are considerably less wonderful when you're trying to pack for two weeks of mixed terrain with a full sleep system, three days of food, and a charging brick the size of a paperback novel.

Em and I run front and rear panniers on every loaded trip, and we've settled on Ortlieb roll-top drybags. They're not cheap. They are, however, waterproof in a way that "water-resistant" bags are not, which is a distinction you care about deeply when it rains on day two and you haven't tested your bag's actual resistance rating. We use a pair of Back-Roller Classics on the rear — the workhorses — and lighter Front-Rollers up front. Weight distribution matters: keep the heaviest items low and towards the rear axle, don't overload the front (you lose steering feedback), and pack so that each side is roughly balanced. An unbalanced bike at the end of a long day is genuinely miserable.

One handlebar bag is a worthwhile addition for snacks, your phone, a rain jacket, and things you want access to without stopping and unlocking a pannier. Keep it light. The moment it starts getting heavy is the moment your steering starts feeling wrong.

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Sleep system

We are what I'd call reluctant campers — we'll do it, and we genuinely enjoy it when the pitch is good, but we're also not above a warm bed and a proper shower when the opportunity exists. What we've landed on is a hybrid approach: tent for remote stretches, Warmshowers when a host is available and sounds promising, and the occasional BnB or cheap hotel when we've had a brutal day and morale is owed something.

The tent is a Hilleberg Akto — a single-skin solo shelter that's lighter than a two-person option and works because we decided early on that separate sleeping spaces meant better sleep for both of us, even if it's a slightly absurd thing to carry two tents instead of one big one. If that sounds like overkill, a good double option is a two-person tunnel tent with a decent vestibule for the bikes. Bivys are for people who are more committed to suffering than I am. They work, clearly — ultralight tourers swear by them — but there's something about lying in a small waterproof sack listening to rain on your face that breaks my spirit in ways a tent does not.

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Cooking (or not cooking)

The elaborate camp kitchen died for us somewhere on the Danube route. We'd been carrying a two-burner setup, a small pan, a collapsible kettle, and enough spices to outfit a modest restaurant, and we realised that we were spending forty minutes cooking something mediocre when we could spend seven minutes in a bakery eating something extraordinary. Central Europe will break you of camp cooking entirely, and I say this as someone who once considered himself a serious camp cook.

What we carry now: a single MSR PocketRocket stove, one titanium mug each, and a small pan for emergencies or long remote stretches. Breakfast is supermarket bread, cheese, whatever fruit was cheap. Lunch is a bakery or a market. Dinner, on camp nights, is a hot meal either cooked simply — pasta, tinned fish, olive oil — or whatever the nearest village restaurant has going. Eating locally is not only more enjoyable than eating from a drybag of dehydrated lentils; it's also, on longer trips, probably cheaper once you account for the fuel canister costs.

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Clothing

The two-set rule: you ride in one, you wash the other. That's it. Two jerseys, two pairs of bib shorts, two base layers, one pair of cycling legwarmers, one light wind shell, one packable down layer. Off-bike: one pair of lightweight trousers, one merino t-shirt, one pair of non-cycling shoes. Everything else is weight you didn't need to carry.

On the merino versus synthetic question, I've shifted firmly toward merino for base layers and casual wear, and synthetic for cycling kit. Merino handles odour far better over multi-day use — relevant when you're not washing daily — but it dries slowly when wet, which matters if you're caught in sustained rain. Synthetic cycling kit dries fast and doesn't hold smell in the same catastrophic way that cotton does. The one merino compromise I won't make: socks. Decent merino socks are one of touring's small unambiguous pleasures.

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Electronics

I use a Garmin Edge for navigation. I know the phone-mount crowd swears by Komoot and their data plans, and it works fine — we've done it — but a dedicated GPS unit running its own battery, readable in direct sunlight, with a proper mount that doesn't vibrate loose on cobblestones, is genuinely worth the cost if you're touring more than occasionally.

For power, we run a dynamo hub on my front wheel, feeding a SON Edelux light and an Sinewave Reactor USB charger. This keeps the phone and Garmin topped up on the bike without thinking about it. Em runs a 20,000mAh power bank as her system, which is lighter initially but requires managing charge states in a way that I find quietly stressful. Both approaches work. The dynamo wins for trips over ten days.

The thing I'd advocate for that nobody asks about: an iPad mini. It sounds absurd on a weight spreadsheet, but for editing photos in the tent on rest days, it's genuinely excellent. We both shoot — nothing serious, just documenting the ride — and processing on an iPad mini with a compact card reader is fast, comfortable, and produces results you can actually share. A laptop would be better; it's also twice the weight and bulk. The phone is fine but cramped. The mini is the right compromise.

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Tools and spares

What you actually need: two tyre levers, a decent multi-tool, a chain breaker (or a multi-tool with one), a spare chain link, a spare inner tube (two is reasonable, three is paranoia), a small bottle of chain lube, a tyre boot for sidewall cuts, and a pump that works properly. That's eight things. The rest of the toolkit you packed — the spoke key you don't know how to use, the cone spanner set, the cassette removal tool — can stay home unless you've genuinely learned to use them. A chain that snaps three days from the nearest bike shop is the argument for the chain link. Everything else is secondary.

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The small things

Camp shoes: a pair of lightweight sandals or Crocs. The moment you unclip and slide your feet into something that isn't a cycling shoe, your soul visibly lifts. Ear plugs: campsite neighbours are unpredictable and sometimes they have generators. A small stove repair kit — replacement O-rings and a jet cleaner — because a blocked jet at altitude is a specific kind of misery. A small dry sack of comfort items: headtorch, book or e-reader, a 50ml of decent whisky for evenings when you've earned it. None of this weighs much. All of it matters disproportionately.

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What we ditched

The chopping board. Obviously. A second pair of cycling shoes (heavy, pointless). A travel towel that was large enough to actually towel down, which made it too large to dry quickly. A French press for coffee — replaced by a simple pour-over cone that weighs nothing. A full-size lock in favour of a lightweight cable, because on most of the EuroVelo routes we've done, you're never far enough from your bike for a D-lock to matter. Em ditched her hair dryer in Portugal on day three and reported that the world did not end.

What I wish I'd ditched sooner: the attitude that more preparation equals more kit. It doesn't.

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On travelling light

There's a version of this hobby where you spend more time optimising the kit than actually riding. I've been that person. The gear forums, the weight weenie calculators, the spreadsheets with per-item gram counts — it's its own form of procrastination, and it produces diminishing returns pretty quickly after the obvious wins. Get the bike right, get the sleep system right, sort your waterproofing, and then stop. The goal is to be moving, to be outside, to be somewhere interesting on a bicycle with the people you want to be with. Italy looks the same from a 12kg touring setup as it does from a 9kg ultralight one, and the extra three kilos bought you a decent tent and dry socks. Both matter more than you think, somewhere around day seven.