Here’s where I am putting my thoughts about gear I decided to bring. Some of it has been great, other items have been abandoned, lost, broken or merely adequate. I think about my gear a lot and hopefully my experience may be useful for others. UPDATE: I’ve stitched up one of rear bags.

Bike: Trek 520 touring bike. This bike has been great, through and through. I’ve noticed a few other long distance riders using the same bike as well. No regrets here. There were a couple issues I’ve had with the bike (other than the bike shop that sold it to me (Ace Wheelworks, Somerville, MA) with low tires at 20 psi, a loose seat, loose toe clips, loose headset, etc.) The first issue to become apparent was that a thin layer of foamy handlebar tape is fine for riding around town, but totally inadequate for a long ride, even when wearing cycling gloves. What really killed by hands was a rough road  with regular pavement cracks every  twenty feet. A guy in a bike shop in Storm Lake, Iowa set me up with another layer of foam handlebar tape wrapped over the first, which improved things greatly. The other shortcoming became apparent in western Nebraska, where I encountered the legendary goat’s head thorn. This innocent looking plant grown these nasty thorns that caused me to wake with two flat tires in the campground in North Platte, NE. The Bontrager Hard Case tires just couldn’t handle these thorns at all; they are simply too thin. The Kevlar-lined Bell tires I got at Wall Mart that afternoon were much better with thorns and better with rougher roads and performed much better as I got onto sand.  I have pulled dozens of goat’s head thorns and one prickly pear cactus thorn out of these and only suffered a single slow leak.

Saddle Bags 

Front Axiom LaSalle 30 liter panniers. These are well made and attach solidly. Tough fabric and solid construction have stood up well to abuse and shown no signs of wear. They resist rain as is and come with rain covers for heavier rains. They have all kinds of straps to compress your load and elastic cord on top to place wet things. The compression straps were kind of overkill for me since I usually had these bags full and the elastic cord didn’t hold things securely, so I ended up losing a couple of things.

Rear Arc Altura 40 liter panniers. These bags can hold a whole lot of gear. They are nice and simple consisting of one large compartment and an internal pocket. You can put lots of stuff in here, just make sure its not too heavy. The fabric is quite thin and light and not even stitched. It appears to be glued (or perhaps ultrasonically welded). This is totally inadequate. I have three holes in my two bags. Two large holes are along seams near the bottom of one bag. I didn’t even pack this bag particularly heavy.  The third hole is in the other bag where one of the straps attaches. I don’t even know how I might be able to repair this. I will be triple stitching all the seams in these bags before I get back on the road. This is too bad. I loved these bags at first for their simplicity and capacity, but they are falling apart after just over a month’s use. They also claim to be waterproof, but I couldn’t verify this since so much water came through the holes. The waterproofing is the coating the fabric on the inside style, not the Ortleib style where you could take them anywhere and they would be dry forever. UPDATE: I was able to repair the holes in one bag by stitching with heavy thread, but this was made difficult by the design. The bags are riveted into their backing plate, so it isn’t possible to remove them and turn the bag inside out.

Bike computer Sigma wireless. I still haven’t figured this thing out. Four unlabeled buttons. Long instruction manuals (yep there are two). Sometimes I  can see my total mileage, sometimes I can’t. I’m just not too motivated to plod through the instructions and figure out just what these guys were thinking. They include useless stuff like gallons of gas saved that you have to cycle through every time you stop for a minute so you can see your trip distance again. Also the display falls off the mount with the slightest tap. I’m amazed I haven’t lost it yet. On the positive side this unit has proved impervious to the rain even as my phone and one rear tail light failed. I also like the nice, simple display, when I can get it to show what I want. I had started with a wired version of this which was much cheaper, but the cable didn’t last me two days, though I met a cyclist along the Erie canal who had the wired version and was coming from the West Coast.

Rain Gear Showers Pass jacket and pants. Served me well in the Great Flood of Boulder.

Google Maps. Well, this isn’t exactly bike gear, nor is it recommended. The issues here are many. First what is marked as a bike trail in the bike layer may not be. It could be a ATV trail.  They say they get some data from rails to trails, but this is clearly not checked. Also even when the trail is a bike trail, there is no indication of what the surface it. There are huge differences between paved, “hard pack,” (finely crushed stone over good clay soil) and a gravel surface (mountain bike only), but they all show up as a nice, solid green line in Google maps. The other big problem with the Google maps bike layer is the navigation. It will direct you to the smallest road possible, but some of these roads are simply not passable on a bike, such as a gravel road in Iowa with a grade of around 12 %. I got about 100 yards, before I concluded that an eight mile detour would be much nicer. This was a constant problem with Google always suggesting dirt, gravel and sand roads over nice paved roads with smooth generous shoulders. Some of this data is available. I got a wonderful bike map from a bike shop in Iowa that showed all the paved roads, along with a color indicating the amount of traffic and outlining of routes that had at least a four foot shoulder. I’m currently exploring the Open Street Map app (OpenStreetMap.org). It is made to be bike friendly, but the user interface is devilishly complicated. It took me a half hour to find out how to map a route from one point to another. Still it appears to have useful features and may prove better than Google maps. Plus I can update it myself to correct mapping errors.

Rants:  Here are a few things that just make me feel a great discontent with the world. You may wish to stop here and instead contemplate the great beauty of the world or all of your good fortunes.

MIcroUSB This is the worst thing ever. This is what prevents me from charging my phone. This is what trashed a $300 phone that was about six months old. All the new Android phones have this little port for charging and connecting to a computer. This seemed like a great improvement over the plethora of different connectors that existed before the EU mandated a single standard. This was a good idea, except that the new standard is terrible. First, cables and connectors don’t always fit well when new. Yep, they’re not all the same size. Next the cables wear out incredibly fast. The idea with MicroUSB was to make sure that the delicate parts (the springy bit that holds the cable in the port) were located on the cable, so that if they failed the inexpensive cable could be replaced rather than the expensive phone. They proceded to design a connected that wears out in months or less. It is quite possible to spend more on cables ($10 to $20 at the convenience store) than on the phone (my latest $100 at WalMart).  Stock up on cheap microUSB cables at monoprice.com ($2.70 “premium” microUSB cables) and make friends everywhere!

And that’s only half the problem. The port on the phone is also prone to failure. It is tiny, recessed and impossible to clean. The port on my phone may have gotten a bit dirty on my trip. I was having increasing trouble charging it from any charger until finally I smelled a burning smell when I plugged it in. End of phone. I still have lots of pictures I would like to retrieve from it, but there is just a bit of battery left and I’ll have to be careful or lose all my pictures that weren’t backed up. This is why I hate microUSB. Thanks. I feel better now.