Life on the Road: Staying Organised

We’ve decided to start a few series of blog posts on our site. We’d welcome your thoughts on what might interest you but for now we have:

• Life on the Road - highlighting aspects of our day to day on the road
• Kit - what kit is working and what kit isn’t
• Musings - thoughts about stuff and that

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Let’s start with our first Life on the Road post…

Staying organised takes on a whole new status when cycle touring, and for good reason. Feral Sam’s standard state of being simply won’t do. For a long time with my workshop and studio, I would try to hold in my head where everything was, with varying degrees of success. If I got busy with work, stuff would end up everywhere. Counteracting this was the fact that I had inherited at least two more of each tool, so it would have to get really bad for me to not find any of my hammers…but it did happen.

Obviously nobody is carrying a hammer on a bike (?) and even less so three hammers. So, everything needs its place and everything needs putting in its place once again when you are not using it. If you can’t find something in the moment it can cause stress, or worse. Before long you’ll be questioning whether you left it on the bench you sat on 10km ago, or was it at last night’s camp spot, 50km ago! On a previous tour, we’ve cycled a long way back on ourselves to find a camera that we left at a restaurant. It was 39C that day and very humid. In those conditions, it’s even more important to stay organised as your brain can turn to mush.

In practice, all this really amounts to is having a specific place for each item, recalling where that is and making sure it goes back there after use. For this we have a structure that starts with panniers at the top level, divider bags below that and then any further dividers that may be necessary. By this stage, I’d be happy to have this as my specialist subject on Mastermind. ‘Pants’, in the orange dry bag inside my right rear pannier. ‘Spare belt’, in the third divider bag down in the rear left pannier. ‘Hammer’, trick question!

Of course you have to be flexible enough to alter where things go as your learn how and when you use stuff. Then it’s a case of relearning where it belongs. For example, I recently started putting the pump for our air mattresses in with one of the mattresses. WHY was I opening and rifling through a whole rear pannier to get that out each night when now the mattresses have the pump with them, and the other pannier can stay closed and organised?

What tips do you have for organising stuff? I know our pal Martin has his panniers labelled Left and Right so that he doesn’t have to think about which side they go on his bike. I’ve even heard of people photographing kit periodically to act as breadcrumbs for their brain.

One thing I am uncharacteristically proud of is my transformation from scatterbrained artist to organised touring cyclist. OK, it helps that I have next to nothing to organise by comparison but it’s a great improvement over Feral Sam, who has accompanied Beck on previous tours. In fact, I hate to say it but Feral Beck has made an appearance a few times so far, when her knack of remembering where things are fails her. I am hoping my new found organisational skills will spur her on to do better :)

[note: despite our best efforts, we once found a whole banana in our bedding and a piece of cutlery in the tent bag…]