On Thursday, July 25, 2024 at 5:48:37 AM UTC-7 Will Boericke wrote: I think your best opportunity there are wheels and saddle. Is it worth asking if the dynamo and lights get used enough to be worth the weight penalty? If you want lighter touring, maybe frame bags might save some weight over racks and panniers. I don't know that you're going to shave a bunch of weight off.
It's definitely worth considering changing your style of touring if expedition-style touring is not for you. I've flipped between expedition-style touring and credit-card touring over the years, and I will say that the credit card style lets you be much more aggressive with your routes and choice of bike than carrying camping gear, stove, and sleeping bag. (https://blog.piaw.net/2008/02/cycle-touring-and-spriit-of-adventure.html) This summer (photos: https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/F4vBBQH_RoiPwZuocdYhiw.-TzKRm6CSeV0PmNYEtKNg5), my 9-year-old son and I did a 823 mile tour with 73000+' of climbing in the Swiss, Italian, and Austrian alps. No way could we have done this much while carrying camping gear. (Note: our tandem was 45 pounds empty!) One day in Bormio we asked the local bike shop (Stelvio experience) if the dirt route from Lago Cancano to Livigno was doable on road bikes. The unequivocal answer from the shop was "No! Maybe with mountain bikes." We chose to do it anyway and the route required 45 minutes of intermittently pushing the bike up a dirt road and a 2km descent losing 600m of elevation. At the Livigno lake a mountain biker looked at us and said: "Wow! You did that with rim brakes on a tandem?!!" I've ridden expedition-style down the Pacific Coast (a much milder choice of route) and enjoyed it thoroughly, but I will be the first to tell you that a credit-card tour with a road style bike in the alps beats that in intensity, beauty, and fun. Both the book Jobst Ride Bike (https://blog.piaw.net/2023/11/review-jobst-brandt-ride-bike.html) and Gary Erickson's "Raising the Bar" (https://blog.piaw.net/2008/06/raising-bar-revisited.html) explains the appeal and method their approach brings. (Though now that I've read Jobst Brandt Ride Bike I realize that Erickson was actually a Jobst acolyte and was supposed to tour with him one year but Jobst got injured and couldn't take him) Piaw -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/5d0bab35-58ab-4c90-8e94-0d126e3f7a7dn%40googlegroups.com.
