Traveling with your own bike

You have certainly heard about – and maybe you had a direct experience of – bicycle touring, i.e. traveling on your bike, something you can experience alone or together with other people, but always with your trustworthy, two-wheeled friend. A bit less famous, and slightly different, type of cycling tourism is bikepacking. If this term is new to you and you want to know what it is about, go on reading!

Discovering bikepacking

In order to better explain what the bikepacking is, let’s start by the etymology of the term, which comes from the more famous word “backpacking”. If backpacking is a journey on foot carrying your backpack, bikepacking is the same, on your bike. The main difference between bikepacking and the traditional cycling tourism is the type of equipment used. A normal bicycle tourist, indeed, knows that he has to use a bike equipped with a rack where to put his/her luggage; on the contrary, a person who chooses bikepacking uses bags that have been conceived for being applied directly on the bike frame, with no need for other elements to secure them on the bike. There are evident advantages as far as lightness and practicality are concerned: when you travel by bike, indeed, you have to carry a notable weight, given by the bike itself, by the luggage and even by the rack; leaving out the rack you will have something less to carry! The agility that you gain from bikepacking is not only given by lightness, it is also due to the fact that this system ensures a better weight distribution, avoiding imbalances that might not only make us slow down, but also lose our balance.

Bikepacking bags

There are different types of bikepacking bags, and each one has been conceived for a given position: there is an underseat bag, which can contain up to 14 liters, then the frame bag, which has to be positioned in the frame triangle, and the handlebar bag. The complete bikepacking equipment includes also the front bag (applied to the headset and frame) and the back bag (fixed to the frame and to the seatpost).
If you are planning a tour on bike, bikepacking might be the ideal solution for you!