So far so good. This stage started late, at 17:28, because I finished some last minute tasks for work and had trouble installing offline maps on my phone. So only 70.4 km today. But since I didn’t do any bike riding for at least 4 weeks, to give my knee a rest, it probably was a good thing to start short.
The average speed suffered from some Google Maps fails when trying to reach a camp site. Never trust Google maps in the dark. Sandy ways through the woods with a pedestrian-like velocity and a pulse >170 are fun… not.
When I reached the camp site, some grumpy old men explained to me that the showers aren’t working – which induced a slight disappointment on my side. No shower no camp. The mixture of sweat, sunscreen, dust, and little flies on my skin was not going to touch the inside of my sleeping bag. So I headed back to a road and looked for options. The next camp site was 15 km away. Google Search made up for Maps, and found me a room in Wensickendorf near Oranienburg only some hundred meters down the road.
I had no time to test the equipment in advance, but so far everything worked quite well. I’ll try to write an equipment paragraph in every post, starting with its weight.
At first, I was a bit worried about the weight of the luggage, which amounts to roughly 32 kg plus up to 6 l of water. But since its divided to the front (12 kg) and back (20 kg), the bike still rides very well. It’s also important to put heavy things at the bottom of the bags, to lower the center of mass.
The reason for the large overall weight is a) that I’m riding alone, so there’s no sharing of things like the tent, the cooking stuff, the bike tools etc., and b) that it’s getting colder and less populated in the north. So I packed warm clothing and roughly 4 kg of trekking food for situations where there’s no shop nearby or when I am going to camp in the wild. A light-weight tent would have saved 2 to 3 kg. The bike itself weighs around 14 kg. Additional parts add another ~2 kg. So with luggage and water, the whole thing easily amounts to ~52 kg. While riding is quite nice, the occasional stairs are hell.
On flat roads with no heavy wind as today, it is possible to sustain an average speed of >20 km/h over long distances, which is on the optimistic side of my estimates. Accelerating takes some effort, but once it moves, it moves. The hydraulic rim brakes have no problem decelerating the bike.
My quite optimistic goal is to ride 160 km on average per day. Let’s see how this works out.