Packing

My bike tour preparations are in the grand finale. On Monday I went to ProCycling to pack my bike. This wasn't as scary as I imagined. Basically, we removed the front wheel and front rack, put spacers on the fork and brakes, removed pedals and the bike was ready to be inserted into a bike box. Besides the bike I put into the bike box also my sleeping mat and sleeping bag. And that was it -- after weighting this monstrosity, it was already over 23kg of allowed weight. What a shame -- I wanted to put some more things there.

With bike packed in the box and without being able to add more things there (in fact, I even removed my pump and bike holder so that the box will surely pass through the weighting process, the hard part of packing started. Importantly, I needed to pack the rest of my things (including panniers) into my backpack. Coupled with a fact the my tent consumes about half of the useable backpack space, this was a packing job of the century. Fortunately, I was able to put these pieces of puzzle together and my full backpack (now weighting ~21 kg) is ready. But of course, I would not be able to fit everything into the backpack. In fact, I realized that my Ortlieb rack-pack is a great hand-luggage bag and my front Ortlieb can be classified as "small accessory" for the purpose of flying. So in the end, I have one big box, one full big  backpack, one hand luggage and one accessory, hopefully everything within the dimensions and weight limits and I am ready to fly.