So please head on over to Patreon and hook us up with a point of beard if you're enjoying it. The first thing you'll notice when you start bike packing is, and I noticed it literally lifting the bike down the stairs my apartments, my apartments upstairs, there's no elevator, it's one floor upstairs. The bike weighs an absolute ton when you have all the kit strapped to it because you have the big handlebar bag with your sleep system on it. You have the big tail bag behind the saddle which is basically your workhorse bag which is holding the cooker, your spare clothes, your spare kit and then you have the dead weight bag underneath your top tube which is holding the heavy stuff like food, tools, spares. So when you go add all this together, I didn't wait a bike but it's north of 20 kilograms, it is heavy and cumbersome and difficult to lift and then you throw on your bottles of course and I just add more to it. So riding through the city went across and I met my training partner who I rode the Wiggler Way with, Matt and met him, we had breakfast over on the south side near the start and we didn't really know what was in store for us, we were a boat a little naive going into it. I feel like we bow packed pretty well and and we didn't bring anything that we didn't use and we didn't want for anything, you know, that we didn't bring. So that was nice and that was comforting to know. That was just off the back of, you know, learning from people who have gone before. Lauren Stendam, if you had on the podcast, he's a YouTube video about it and chatting to him on what he brought and that worked super well for us. So it starts off, you get through Marley Park and there's a little bit of a road section and up to Taylor's Pub and there's, you know, some big road inclines, you know, north of 10, 12% inclines there. And you just zip up them on the road, boy, with a little bit of a, you know, pant. But when you're on the gravel bike, laden with kiss and food in your pockets, it is a heavy push on these. Any time the road kicks above 6%, 7% with that much weight on the bike, on the bike, it's difficult and it's challenging. And you end up dealing with the little, you know what a wee little postman, zig, zig, zag, or you're going from left to right on the road. The trail starts out beautifully picturesque and you hit this beautiful bit of single track and it's really nice and I was enjoying that flowy little section until I got my force puncture today and talk about being ill-prepared. I think we had I don't know five tubes between us but all of my hand up I never checked the depth of my wheels literally got tubes the day before in a rush sorry the morning of in a rush I pulled them into my bag, never checked the length of the valves. So ended up after, I would say, 15, 20 kilometers of the week away, one hour in to a 16-hour odyssey. Fixing punctures all school with a puncture repair kit because the only tube I had with a long enough valve to get through the long carbon rim on my Reynolds wheels was the one I in fact punctured. So that was a little bit of a downer. But it gave some time to reapply Sun Cream and Bug Spray and all that sort of good stuff. The first real challenge of this, and the main challenge is the first real time you're going to take to yourself what the fuck I got myself into is Jokes and it's a long climb. It's a long off-road technical climb and if you have good scales and you're moving well you can just about ride this. I was on the limit, I didn't have a parameter on my gravel bike but I would have had long sections over 400 watts just keeping the boy going forward and you're gonna need good technical skills as well you're moving around there's not a clean line. You're over rocks you're over loose dirt you're picking your way up little ridges and true gaps and then when you get to the top it's not quite finished either because it stays on a plateau and the plateau is these narrow in our land we call them sleepers I'm not sure internationally what they're call, they're basically a two by four wooden beam and you're trying to balance along the top of this to ride along.
And on a mountain bike, on a gravel bike, on a normal day, balancing on this, it's a little bit challenging, but it's not overly challenging. But when you have all the equipment on the bike, that throws off the center of gravity a little bit. So it requires a little bit more focus. I was able to ride across them without any mishaps, thankfully. If you couldn't ride them, you ended up just walking for a kilometer after kilometer. There must have been eight, nine kilometers of this stuff. So, you know, that's a skill you definitely need because if you slide off the edge of the board, you are going to get a nasty enough spill because they're elevated boards. Another thing to bear in mind if you're dealing with this Wicklow wire, a similar adventure, is where are you getting water? Streams are a good source of water, but you need to know, you know, streams that aren't moving versus streams and moving. I didn't know that before going out but you drink the water, it is moving rather than distagning and pooling water, popping these little chlorine tablets and the water is good to drink. That got me out of a hole and then higher up the top of the mountain we were able to find water that was free-flowing and it hadn't run through anything, just filtered through some nice limestone rock and it was super clear. Mass did get a stomach bug that night but not sure if that was related to the water if that was related to something that aids or just an eight-hour day of exertion with, you know, so on on top of that dehydration, on top of that poor nutrition because you're eating off your bike all day on top of that. The first real time that I was like, oh, what have we got ourselves into here was the first long section of hike a bike. And we've seen a couple of hikers and they had poles and they were like, well kitted up for the day of hike and then here I come, bike on my back, trying to carry it down this completely unroyable, you know, Machu Vanderpaul on a good day before he smashed himself in the mountain bike race, wouldn't have rolled down this. It was an impossibility to ride down it. So, bike on the back and you're trying to scurry and kind of just make your way almost, you know, it's just such poor foot and all the way down and it's, you're scarpering down this thing and it's difficult walking and it's difficult with the bike on your back when you're dehydrated and the bike is heavy and the pedals are banging into your back. You need good patience and you need perspective as to why you're out there because those bits aren't that enjoyable. End of a long forest day I think we put down eight and a half hours. We set up camp and that's probably the most fun part of the day, find them somewhere to camp, setting up the camp, Sparking up the camp stove, cooking, making yourself a noise, cup of hot chocolate. And I had this taste of like absolute horseshit, like a boil and a bag curry. Do not get that ever. It was like a camp and specific meal. So you heat up the water, you add it into the bag, leave it for 10 minutes, come back to it and it's apparently a chicken curry. It tastes like shit wrapped in other shit. It was shocking. And I actually didn't feel brilliant going to bed that noise from that chicken curry. slept, amazing pro tip from LTD, was earplugs, bring the earplugs, stick them in, they worked really well, earplugs had myself an inflatable little mattress that went underneath because you want to get yourself up off the ground with a really light sleeping bag and the tent from Big Agnes which was a super light tent. Total to set up the entire camp probably took us under 30 minutes, we were doing it just as the sun was setting and by the time you cook down and you chill out, have a bit of a chat decompressed for the day, it's basically bedtime. Now the next morning we wanted to get moving so we broke up the camp, repacked it into the bike and it's like going on holidays. You know when you go out on holidays you bring a lot of stuff and then you try to bring it home and it's like how did this stuff fit into that suitcase?