Finishing touches

I visited The Bike Station today and bought some second hand parts again. This time I came home with a bottle cage, a saddle and a plastic rock ring/chain guard. I was also looking for some extra fasteners for the front pannier but I did not find anything usable.

The bottle cage required some grinding with Dremel as the screws on Dora's current bike had too large caps. Simple job and now her bike has a bottle cage as well. The saddle was a little bit unplanned purchase but by accident I spotted softer and a tiny bit wider saddle for Dora. I guess it is women's model as it was uncomfortable for me but she preferred it. Unfortunately the chain guard did not fit but I paid three pounds for those three items so I wont complain.

Tonight we made 13km ride with fully laden panniers and this time I had the tent and front panniers. The bike starts to deserve its new name "the Mule". No more sudden turns. Otherwise it feels quite ok and actually the ride is more comfortable because of the extra weight.

Packing exercise, bungee cords and clothing

We decided to use the front panniers after all on my bike. A week or so ago I bought a simple front pannier rack. I am not totally happy with the way how I managed to attach it but I think it will do. After all, the items in the front bags will be more bulky than heavy. Today we packed our bikes to see if everything fits and at the moment it looks good. We try to have as light backpacks as possible and place everything heavy in the rear panniers.

Finding decent bungee cords turned out to be a bit more difficult than I first thought. The bungee cords are elastic cords with hooks at the ends and such cords are handy for securing tent on the top of the rack. I bough a set from an eBay seller but those cord were plain rubbish. They were elastic only on one direction and some of the hooks came of right away. I got a refund and headed to local B&Q store and bought a set of much stronger cords.

On Saturday we did 45-50km bike ride to the Edinburgh airport and then to Craigie's farm and finally back home via Cramond and Promenade. On the way to airport we visited Alpine bikes in Stockbridge as I managed to convince Dora that she should get bicycling shorts as well. We managed to find women's cycling shorts with separate over shorts so that should be fine now. Near South Gyle it then started to rain and I can tell my rainproof trousers were totally dry in the wardrobe...

Preparations update

We have now booked train tickets with bicycle reservations. The routes are Edinburgh-Oban and Inverness-Edinburgh. The Ullapool-Inverness will be done by bus.

Physical preparation has been going on as well. We have made a test trip of 15km with loaded panniers and we did not encounter any serious issues. So, things look good but there are still plenty to do.

Pannier bags

Previously we did not have any pannier bags for our bikes. If we did shopping or similar we simply carried everything in our back packs. That is fine for short trips but biking several days with heavy trekking rucksacks would ruin our backs in no time.

Preparing bikes

Our bikes are pretty normal mountain bikes and we have used them for shopping trips and reasonably short trips, around 10 miles. But doing biking for several days with all the camping gear requires some preparations for the bikes.