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I got back home yesterday from my second ever S24O. For those not yet in the know, a "sub 24 hour overnight" is a low-effort, minimally planned one night camping trip made via bicycle. They are intended to cut out all the commitment and contingencies associated with traditional bicycle touring (taking time off work, hoping the weather is good at that time, having to book accommodation in advance and then keep up with your planned schedule, making sure you don't forget anything you can't find easily on the road, etc.) and make bike camping accessible and even compatible with full-time work: you can head out in the evening after work, spend the night, and set off early enough to arrive home at roughly the time you'd usually get out of bed. I wrote about my first one previously - roughly two years ago! Has it really been that long? I need to make more time for this kind of thing! Proof that even with all the hard stuff stripped away, the biggest obstacle can still easily be your own commitment and priorities.
2018-09-22 Phlog report on my first S24O (2018-09-22)
Aside from the obvious change of taking place in a different country, this outing was also done at a different time of year (summer vs autumn) and on a different bike! I only brought the Franken-Peugeot with me from Finland to Sweden: I sold my trusty Tunturi VIP 3 speed before I left, and I sincerely hope it is still happily rolling somewhere in its native land. The Franken-Peugeot is still not really well setup for load bearing, although I'm excited to announce that this will finally change in the near future. But for now, since the weather is warm I figured I wouldn't need much stuff and so I tried loading it up "bike-packing style".
A brief digression: in recent years bicycle touring has become strongly influenced by the ultralight backpacking (ULB) philosophy. I've always had kind of an odd relationship with ULB. Obviously I'm perfectly happy to have lighter gear, and I admire the "do more with less" mentality that is part and parcel of the movement. But I am less happy with the obsession with expensive, high tech gear and the relentless chasing of diminishing returns which also seem to go along with it. The idea of getting outdoors and experiencing a simpler mode of living being an expensive, exclusive thing doesn't sit well with me at all. I don't mind forking out for good stuff if it's a "buy it for life" kind of situation, but ultralight gear is of necessity less durable than heavier stuff, and new innovations are always making the lightest possible X even lighter, and the newest stuff is naturally very trendy. All of this pushes things more in the direction of "buy it for a season or two" and also injects a kind of fashion mentality into a space I would prefer was free of that. Anyway, rant over.
Bike-packing eschews things like racks and panniers as dead weight, in favour of strapping stuff directly to the bike frame. This works a lot better with modern bike geometries, and especially mountain bike geometries than it does a good old fashioned straight top tubed diamond frame with a fist full of seatpost like the Franken-Peugeot, and also with drop bars rather than moustache bars, but I gave it a go. Not to toot my own horn, but I have an impressive collection of cheap military surplus leather straps of various lengths and widths; they are wonderfully versatile things for strapping, well, just about anything to, well, just about anything else. Using a pile of these I managed to attach my summer-weight sleeping bag under my handlebars, my camping pillow to one side of my head tube, a tarp underneath my top tube, and a foam mat to the back of my saddlebag - which hasn't been introduced yet, I might make a short separate post about it in the near future. I bought it used here in Sweden, it's by Ostrich, who are, roughly, the Japanese version of Carradice. After lusting after this kind of super-traditional canvas and leather saddlebag for years, I'm actually kind of disappointed in it, but, anyway, that can all wait for another entry.
So far, so good, I had hoped I could fit everything else into the saddlebag plus a light bum bag (aka "fanny pack") and end up with nothing on my back. In the end, I couldn't do this and it annoyed me to no end. It didn't feel right or fair that what I thought of as a pretty minimal load out took up more space than the Ostrich bag could accommodate, but at the end of the day you can't argue with geometry. I think the biggest problem is that my cooking equipment just isn't very compact. I probably could have gotten away with my desired arrangement if I was content to just drink water and eat Cliff Bars or the like the entire time, and I'm sure some people would do exactly that in order to lighten their load, but to my mind this would defeat the point of the exercise, which is to actually enjoy myself somewhat out there, not to make my gear as light as possible at any cost. So, I reluctantly added a backpack to handle some additional odds and ends. I hate packing for this kind of thing: it always seems to take longer than I think it reasonably should. There is always one more small thing that I remember I need, and I never know where to find it. I guess if I did these more often I'd get better at this part of it.
Finally, I set off sometime in the mid afternoon. I rode to a forest in a small neighbouring town I have ridden to a few times before, 18km away. I had absolutely no problem with any of the stuff strapped to the frame moving around, coming loose, falling off or getting in the way of me riding, which was great. For the right kind of gear, the strapping-directly-to-the-bike approach does seem to work wonders. I didn't really notice any substantial change in ride comfort or handling, which I guess makes sense. All the stuff up front was quite lightweight. The stuff in the saddlebag was heavier, but that's quite close my own body's centre of mass, so it shouldn't make a big difference. To my surprise, unlike on my first S24O, I didn't find the riding itself much harder by virtue of the extra weight or air resistance. Because the Franken-Peugeot is a single speed bike I necessarily ended up pedalling a little harder and at a lower cadence than I do when I'm unladen, but I actually seemed to be able to ride much longer this way without needing to take a break, compared to when I'm spinning fast and light. Makes me wonder if I wouldn't benefit from a slightly increased gear ratio in general. Anyway, I think I could easily go more than 18km with this setup if I wanted to. I fairly quickly arrived at the forest and, after a little exploration, found somewhere nice to set up camp.
I ended up deciding not to use the tarp at all, because there was no rain forecast, the skies were very clear so I trusted the forecast, and there was very little wind, so I thought why not just enjoy the view and left it at my mat and sleeping bag. Unsurprisingly, compared to autumn, there were a *lot* more bugs around. The mosquitoes were, as fully expected, the most annoying, but I was surprised at just how many ants and flies were about, too. I used some nasty DEET stuff to keep them off my exposed skin and it was fairly effective, but I'm very keen to hear of effective alternatives if anybody knows anything that works from personal experience (although I'm not holding my breath). Even with the DEET on, I avoided wandering around too much, because my cycling pants are only ~3/4 length and there was quite a bit of tall grass around, making me nervous about ticks. I more or less stayed put at camp once I had everything in place. With the ride being fairly short I probably could have got away just fine wearing hiking pants (I'm pretty sure this is what I did on my first S24O, although that forest was only about 10km from home), which would have let me do a little more wandering around.
I spent most of my time before bed playing with various toys. I brought my shortwave radio along, as I usually do when I'm going somewhere vaguely remote, as that's the only time I can hear much on it. I did a little bit of listening just before going to bed, and heard more Russian broadcasts than I am used to picking up in Sweden. Nothing too interesting in English: China Radio International, Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, BBC World Service. But in addition to the radio I brought more tech along this time than I normally do. In general, this is something I'm kind of conflicted about. I could have sworn that I'd phlogged about it previously, but I couldn't find anything with some quick grepping. The basic crux of the matter is my inability to decide whether or not making non-trivial use of a computer while camping in the forest is a great way to combine two things I really enjoy, or a sacrilegious exercise which defeats the point of trying to get away from it all and constitutes mixing together things which should be kept separate and provide a kind of balance to one another.
I have been curious about this notion ever since I read an old interview with Yan Zhu (from before the Brave browser was a thing, and before she became a DJ), which ended with this response to the question "What would be your dream setup?":
Shooting for the stars now: let's design computers so that software engineering doesn't force us to occupy constrained, mostly-immobile positions in florescent-lit rooms for 8+ hours every day. I'd like to code and go backpacking at the same time.
Yan Zhu interview at usesthis.com
An old phlog post referencing the same interview (2017-09-25)
I experimented with this idea a bit when I kicked off my annual Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge (ROOPHLOC) last year (which will return this September!), and took an old eeePC running OpenBSD into my favourite forest back in Finland. I also took that machine into that forest one or two other times to experiment with using a little USB sound card to record shortwave radio, but that's about the extent of my outdoor computing experience.
The inaugural ROOPHLOC announcement (2019-08-31)
Anyway, lately I have been chatting with the lovely Shufei about her use of tablets. I have a mediocre old Lenovo tablet kicking around which I almost never use, and have been wondering whether or not I can do something useful with it or whether I should just try to sell it. The little eeePC is incongruously heavy (almost all of the weight is in the battery, which is shockingly dense), and my Thinkpad X220 daily driver has pretty rubbish battery life (by virtue of being old, used, and spending most of its life plugged in), but a tablet is sort of just right for the forest computing application. I have really never taken them - or anything where the primary mode of text input is a touchscreen - remotely seriously as a computing device, mentally categorising them as "consumption devices", which I don't think is unfair or inaccurate. But with a little more research I'm starting to see them as, potentially, more than that. I consider a real keyboard non-negotiable for coding or writing anything like this post, and I had thought this necessarily meant a Bluetooth keyboard, and that this necessarily meant a device with a built-in, non-replaceable rechargeable battery, my aversion to which is well-documented by now. But it turns out AA or AAA-powered Bluetooth keyboards exist, and I've also learned that USB "On The Go" (OTG) is a thing, meaning you can actually plug peripherals into the micro-USB port that I thought was exclusively for charging or transferring files, so a wired keyboard with no battery at all is also an option. With a nice, small keyboard, a good terminal emulator and an ssh connection to a real computer, doing a little bit of hacking outdoors might actually not be too unpleasant an experience at all. I'll keep pondering this.
Phlog post on non-replaceable batteries turning functioning devices into e-waste (2017-10-10)
That's all speculative future stuff, anyway. On this trip, I just brought the tablet as is. I used it to do some technical reading, but also spent quite a bit of time just chilling on the Fediverse with friends. It was actually really pleasant, and didn't feel like an inappropriate thing to be doing at all. On the contrary, being all by myself in the middle of nature but still being connected to people felt somehow right. I am convinced that this outdoor computing idea is worth pursuing a little further. I seem to have some pretty clear intuitive sense of which kinds of tech-use I am and am not happy with in this setting. I also brought my MiniDisc player along on this trip, and while I enjoyed listening to music as much as I ever do, I was acutely aware that I was stopping myself from hearing any of the sounds of the forest and that, somehow, felt wrong. For some reason, shortwave listening doesn't feel wrong in the same way. Maybe because, again, it feels like it provides some sense of connection to the rest of the world, here and now, whereas pre-recorded music feels escapist? No idea, I don't claim to fully understand these gut feelings.
Despite the various other changes, the food part of this trip was almost entirely unchanged from my first attempt: exactly the same dinner, cooked with exactly the same gear. Somehow, during the realisation that I wasn't going to be able to get away with the saddlebag only and the subsequent transfer of some gear into my backpack, I ended up leaving my spoon behind, and I was worried that was going to make eating pea soup one heck of a challenge. In the end, I did okay. It's highly condensed in the can (as in, so thick you cannot pour it), but I managed to scoop the majority of it out using the removed lid of the can, gently bent into a potato chip shape, only getting my hands slightly dirty in the process. After adding the requisite amount of water, I stirred it in with a stick, after shaving the edges off with my knife so that only clean, smooth wood was involved and there was no risk of shedding bark or moss in there. Once it was hot, I had remarkable success fashioning a spoon out of my bread roll, which was long and narrow, not round, and had a nice thick crust. Perfect for the job! On my first S24O, I was actually going in to work the very next day, so I was trying to get an early departure and I decided that on future trips a much quicker breakfast than porridge would help with this quite a bit. I didn't actually need to heed that realisation on this trip at all as I'm still on summer vacation, but nevertheless I made do with some Belvita breakfast biscuit type things and a little bit of dried fruit, which was fine, and saved me carrying the weight of a second pot. I still made pour over coffee, though.
I slept terribly, but I'm not inclined to blame this too much on anything specific to the trip. As I have phlogged previously, I'm having a lot of trouble sleeping even at home these days. Despite trying to sleep from about 10:30 pm onward, I was still awake at midnight. I did feel colder than I expected to, which may have contributed somewhat (the overnight temperature wasn't forecast to get below 9°C, but I guess in a shady forest it can get cooler than the urban areas the forecast probably targets). I ended up putting my jacket on inside my sleeping bag, which made it entirely bearable, if not quite comfortable. I think as a matter of principle I will just always take some woolly socks and a beanie on all future camping trips no matter the weather. It's not a lot of weight or space and far better to have them and not need them than vice versa. Even with the cold no longer really a problem, I was still awake at midnight. Which was around the time when things got exciting.
Phlog post on my recent insomnia (2020-06-03)
At this time of the year, it never really gets truly dark at any point in time. Around midnight it was still very easy to see the silhouettes of all the trees against the sky, and I thought it might make for a nice photograph. I have been playing lately with an older compact digital camera, a Canon Ixus 70 - I'm well overdue to make a photography update post on my forays into digital photography, maybe I'll get around to that soon. I grabbed it out of my bag and powered it up, and very shortly after I heard...well, something. The nearest familiar sound I could liken it to is a dog barking, but it didn't actually sound quite like a dog, although I couldn't easily describe how it was different. It was, at any rate, very clearly an unhappy mammal of non-trivial size which didn't sound *that* far away. The barking happened three or maybe four times over the course of a minute or so while I took a few photos (none of them really proved all that interesting), and never happened again after I turned the camera off.
I spent the next half an hour or so being very still, very quiet, and very attentive, while two parallel trains of thought kept running through my mind on repeat:
I declined to perform the experiment. The barking never happened again, and I didn't hear anything moving around. Having done a little research back home, yes, there are wolves here, but generally not this far down South. Much more surprisingly, I have also learned that, believe it or not, moose can bark! That seems a much more likely explanation to me. Anyway, the excitement soon died down and I got right back to not sleeping.
To some extent, camping entirely out in the open during a Nordic summer when one is not sleeping well to begin with is a pretty terrible idea. I meant to bring an eyemask with me, but it stayed home with the spoon. It starts getting pretty seriously light around 3am, and not only light but bird song starts to kick in quite heavily as well. The combination of the two provides an overpowering intuitive sense of "it's time to get up!", which roused me from what little sleep I'd managed to get since the barking moose incident, and made it even harder to get back to sleep. I managed to drift in and out of sleep until around 6:30am, by which point I gave up and got up, much earlier than I'd intended. Apparently the local slug population is most active overnight, and I woke up to find shiny silver trails over my sleeping bag and mat, plus a few slugs still chilling on my gear. I'm going to have to sponge those off this weekend, which is kind of gross. I am thinking about trying out hammock camping. Not only would a hammock pack down a lot smaller than a foam mat, it would keep me off the (sometimes damp or cold) ground and away from many of the creep, crawly, slimy things making their way around down there. No help by itself with the mosquitoes, of course.
Despite the fitful sleep, I didn't feel too bad at all come morning. I made coffee, had breakfast, and didn't wait too long before breaking camp and heading back home. This felt to me, very much a non-morning person, like an insanely early start to the day, but cycling back along the logging path leading out of the forest (which was *way* rockier than I remember it being, like maybe they dumped a lot of crushed rocks on it sometime in the spring when it was really muddy to make driving trucks through easier?) at about 7:30am I passed by a woman jogging, so I guess it's normal for some folk!
The ride home was really nice and calm. The route is relatively flat the entire way, but heading home it is generally downhill - only gently so, but enough that it feels just a little bit easier. There is one part in particular where you can just coast continuously for quite a distance. The path undulates a bit, but you usually pick up just enough speed on the downhill bits to be able to crest over the small uphills and then you can start over, never completely stopping, never building up really serious speed, just comfortably rolling along. I really love the way this feels, moving so far without expending any energy of my own. I feel like a bird gliding between thermal updrafts, it's just wonderful. This part of the path follows the edge of some fields, full of crops that I can't identify, and there were a lot of actual birds around, mostly jackdaws, sometimes flying round, sometimes just sitting on the path, lazily hopping out of my way as I approached.
I was home and showered by about 9am, so perhaps the entire adventure was around 18 hours, door-to-door.
I definitely, definitely need to do more of these, but I think I need to be smarter about my scheduling. Spring and autumn seem like much better times of the year to do this kind of thing, when there are less bugs around and it actually gets dark at night so you can sleep outdoors. I think maybe a good strategy is to do S24Os in those months, while I'm working, and then during summer time proper maybe I can take advantage of the time off work to do some actual long distance travel. It would be a lot of fun to spend one or two or three consecutive nights staying in cheap B&Bs or hostels some distance apart, ending up more than 100kms away from where I started and then taking a train home at the end. I should look into possible routes for that.