Nice rack!

I've been trying to commute into the office on the bike a bit more but it's hard when I'm out on site 2 or 3 days a week. I need to plan in advance, take spare shirts into the office, make sure I have my laptop at home when I need it for evening meetings etc etc etc. So to avoid the excuses I bought myself a bike rack, which means I can carry my laptop & all appropriate clothing whenever I need to without pre-planning.

I had a look around and went for a freeload rack, designed in New Zealand for mountain bikers. I can actually fit regular racks on my normal commuter bike but I decided to spend a little bit more and get a rack that can attach to any of my bikes. Plus it looks a lot cooler and is easily removable.

The rack is well built, easy to fit and very versatile. It straps on to the seat stay of the bike which means that regardless of the bike setup you can put a bag on the back, or on the front if you mount it on the forks (all the mounting gear for both options come with the pack) . A very cool piece of kit, delivered within 5 days and well worth a look if you fancy some bike touring on a bike that's not built with rack mounts.

Fortunately Gordy had a surplus laptop bag which after a bit of tweaking fitted perfectly

It's surprisingly hard riding with a pannier. It only adds a few kilograms but the bike feels very sluggish and hard to get moving, and makes me respect cycle tourers like Kitty immensely . Admittedly riding a single speed with flat pedals doesn't help, but in the long term I'm sure it will only make me stronger. It's also got me thinking about cycle-touring (or 'bikepacking') - the idea of strapping a sleeping bag, a bivi bag and a bottle of scotch to a mountain bike and heading out for a night under the stars is very appealing.

Cycle tourers are often considered the 'beardy wierdies' of the cycling world so it's good to experiment with that element of the sport without fitting into all of the conventional cliches.