I bought a bike in January, with the intention of building up to bikepacking at some point later in the year. This would enable me to more effectively whittle down my list of journeys by doing some of those I’d struggle to do walking on two wheels instead.
What with all the running then a binge of hiking over the summer, I only managed 9 rides in total during the year. One of these was an overnighter to a local campsite – a test of my bikepacking kit and process. It went fine, but that’s as far as I got. So 2026 will be the year to actually do some bikepacking**.
The bike itself is a Trek Dual Sport 1 – which is a bit of a mixture bike. A long way from a gravel bike, but it’s still got decently wide tyres and can handle as much offroad as I want to do, whilst still doing a decent job as a more everyday machine. I only intend to have one bike, and this was the compromise I went for.
I have a number of my long distance walks that look a lot more achievable if I were to do them by bike – if I waited to walk them, I might never do them, so it is better to do these journeys by bike than not at all.
My goal for 2026 is to to knock off at least one reasonable length multi-day journey by bike, but as to what they will be who knows….
**I know there are those out there to whom the term “bikepacking” means something very specific: travelling light offroad on a long distance ride, or something like that, and that the same journey done by road they’d rather were called “cycle touring” or similar. I don’t intend to let myself be “gatekept” by terminology. In truth I’ll probably be doing a bit of a hybrid.
In the words of the Queen song…
Bicycle, bicycle, bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle, bicycle, bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like
You say black, I say white
You say bark, I say bite
You say shark, I say hey man
Jaws was never my scene
And I don't like Star Wars
You say Rolls, I say Royce
You say God give me a choice
You say Lord, I say Christ
I don't believe in Peter Pan
Frankenstein or Superman
All I wanna do is....
You get the point…
