Selling our Trailers – End of an Era
What finally settled us on switching was the ease of not having to take down the trailers under awkward circumstances. We are traveling in third-world countries for the next eight years or more, and we will encounter awkward situations.
If we ever have to take a bus or a train, or when we need to put our gear on a small funky ferry boat to cross a lake from one country to the next, we can’t afford the extra time of dismantling the trailers (though it is amazingly fast and easy). We don’t want to have the extra bulk and weight of the trailers and then have to figure out what to do with everything inside the trailer.
We did think seriously about switching the type of trailer we had and getting large waterproof bags for our gear, but that still left us with the challenge of the extra time to dismantle the trailer and the extra weight and bulk of the trailer itself.
One much smaller factor, but one we may find is a wonderful unexpected bonus, is that we will be riding much closer together with panniers instead of having the length of the trailers between us. It gives a better chance to talk while riding, and perhaps we will even starting drafting each other.
After all our thinking and talking, we gradually realized that we wanted to switch to panniers. While Chelsea was in California last April, I finally ordered our Ortlieb waterproof panniers, a full front and back rack set, bright yellow with black accents. We’ll be getting the matching waterproof handlebar bags too.
The bags have an incredibly easy clip on and off system, and they have shoulder straps as well. It doesn’t look like we’d want to hike any distance with the shoulder straps, but they would have come in handy a number of times on our prior trips.
We love the fact that now everything we own is waterproof. We’ll still have organizational challenges in packing and finding things easily, but we’ve already started thinking that through and making decisions.
We love the fact that we now have only a few bags to toss around, instead of seemingly hundreds of smaller items.
In terms of riding with them? We’ll get used to it. We didn’t know how to ride with the trailers either when we started; we learned a lot along the way.
So we finally put our trailers up for sale on both Craigslist and Crazyguyonabike. We had immediate responses, and could have sold them several times over. After a few hiccups, one is now wending its way to Carmichael CA, to a guy who tours multiple times a year and has for years; the other one is headed to New Orleans to a guy who is touring to Mexico (and possibly Peru) with a partner, a dog, an accordion, and a fiddle.
We are incredibly sad that we had to sell our trailers (we have so many great memories and so many great trailer stories), we would much rather have kept them for future touring in the US and for trips around town, but we are delighted that they have gone to good homes.
Streamlining weight and bulk
When we saw the size of the panniers, we nearly had a heart attack at how small they are compared to the size of the trailers. We’ve been on a big kick anyway of reducing our bulk and weight, but this really lit a fire under us.
Digitizing everything possible has provided the biggest of amount of weight and bulk savings. We have scanned photos, music, movies, “memories”, receipts for our gear, manuals for things we are bringing with us, and more, and put them on two little bitty portable hard drives we are bringing with us (one is 650 GB, the other is 1 TB).
That means no more paper manuals, no more DVDs (in fact, we now have close to two hundred movies to choose from instead of the same six favorites we had with us).
We are each carrying smartphones, and the smartphones will have apps for stargazing, bird watching, recognizing scat, recognizing snakes, fish identification, animal footprint IDs, shell identification, and the like. We no longer have to carry bird books, fish books, and all the identification pamphlets we had with us.
We are getting higher capacity SD cards for our smartphones and putting music on them, so they will double as our music players. That means no more Walkmans and iPods.
We’re getting Bluetooth headsets for the smartphones, which means we no longer have to carry the very useful but bulky and heavy headset for our Skype calls, nor will we have our iPod headsets.
We have Kindles (though I’m pretty sure we are switching to the new Nook e-ink reader), so we no longer have our stash of paperbacks to carry, nor do we have to carry the thesaurus, the travel guidebooks, or the language dictionaries.
Both of us are working towards buying lightweight laptops (three pounds) with solid-state hard drives to replace our current models. We’ll share one external DVD drive. That will give us more durability with less weight and less bulk.
Lighter clothing, strange though that may sound, is also high on our list. Cotton is heavy, bulky and doesn’t dry quickly, so we are gradually switching to all technical fabrics and silk and wool. We now have Patagonia Rock Guide long pants and shorts, and talk about amazing! Think quick-dry, water resistant, attractive and incredibly comfortable, even in the 107+ real-feel heat we’ve been having here. What a find they were!
We have two lightweight, no-wrinkle, easy care, quick-dry, attractive dresses from pRana, the Sonja dresses. We are working on replacing the rest of our current wardrobe with more items like the pants, shorts and dresses.
The bulk we have already saved is astonishing, never mind the weight, and we aren’t done yet. We figure that we have saved about twenty pounds so far. Add to that the fact that I’ve lost thirty pounds in body weight, and this upcoming leg of our trip is starting to look a whole lot easier.