Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Cycling through eastern Germany - my bike and bags

I am signing off for this series with a brief presentation of my bike and bags. You can see the bike in its original form here. In the picture to the left (incidentally, that's a fellow camper, not me), you can see the bike with all of my bags.

Essentially, I bought the two Moonbiker saddle bags which go over the bike rack. Because you cannot have any front bags on this bike, those bags are made to be as big as the normal front and rear saddlebags for standard bikes.

Above that, you can see a silver case -- the Office 2, a very lightweight, waterproof "briefcase" that I put my electronics stuff in. Above it, the black case is actually a solar bag with a battery inside. It is not waterproof, but whatever you have in there can be charged from the battery, and the solar cells have a peak output of 17 watts. Overall, you should be able to run your laptop from five hours of sun with that solar bag. I mainly wanted it so that my GPS device could guide me the whole day if I needed it to. The solar bag is simply held on using common bungee cords, which are hooked into the four large eyelets on each corner of the bag. Unfortunately, the solar bag has some inside pockets and lining that cannot be removed, and I do not need all those pockets -- it is just extra weight for me.

The green thing that the guy seems to be sitting on is not actually the seat, but rather one of those 2 seconds tents that you just throw up into the air, and they land completely opened up and ready to drive into the ground with stakes. I did not know where I was going to put that circular, flat tent until I realized that it can easily be slid into the space between the seat and the bike rack. I can then tie it on to the saddlebags to keep it from flying off.

All of that luggage space is actually more than I need, especially the two boxes on the top, which were largely empty.

The Office 2 is attached to the luggage rack with a special mounting frame that also holds the saddlebags in place -- they fit like a glove (see the second picture). I would recommend that anyone who gets this bike with those saddlebags should get that mounting frame in addition regardless of whether you get the Office 2 or not.

The whole system stayed on the bike very well over 720 some odd kilometers, including all of that cobblestone, and it can be taken off and put on the bike in just a few seconds.

1 comment:

  1. It looks funny. But during my biking, I use to carry only Back Pack, since I feel very Comfortable with that. I have an excellent Hydrated Pack with me, which I bought from Hydrapak which is an online store.

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