Last week I spent some time obsessively weighing things with my new scale, and came to the conclusion that, proud of it as I was, at nearly 29 lbs my DIY flatbed trailer was not going to be a good option for ride carrying all my gear on a multi-day ride.
This leaves me with a couple of options - either I buy a lightweight cargo trailer for the ride, or I try to get everything on the rear cargo rack.
Getting everything on the rear rack is almost certainly the less expensive option, and my Catrike Expedition is built to be able to do this very sort of thing (it’s right there in the name, after all). Other people do trike packing this way - Sylvia Halpern and her trike Myrtle the Turtle and Matt Galat at Jayoe being some more public examples of this. I’ve watched Sylvia’s videos, and one of the things that is clear is that she has much bigger panniers than I do.
The bags currently on my trike are Axiom Seymour Oceanweave P25’s. I ordered these when I ordered my Expedition back in 2019, and they have served me well for carrying my everyday stuff - tools, tubes, patch kits, extra water bottles, clothes (particularly in winter) and sundries. They’ve even been up to the task for small volume grocery runs. I liked them as an option when I ordered them because they are a single unit - the two bags are connected by a somewhat rigid fabric section that connects to the top of the rack. The center, connecting section has a handle on it, and that all seemed like it would be pretty handy as a way to easily allow you to pick up the bags and carry them around if needs be. And it is, tho it’s a feature I’ve only rarely used.
The “25” in the name is the number of liters they can carry between the two bags. In actual capacity that’s on the relatively small side. It’s certainly adequate to my everyday needs, and has been more than capable for longer single day rides, but I’ll need more space than they can offer by themselves. One option, obviously, would be to get larger panniers. The challenge with this is that any decent set of bags that are sufficiently larger than my current option starts to get somewhat pricey. Combine, for example, a set of 40L Ortlieb Panniers with a Rack-Pack bag and your price starts to come very close to the cost of a Burley Trailer. That’s not necessarily a problem if it meets your needs, but it does make one want to investigate A) how well the trike does at carrying things in general; and 2) whether stuff you already have can meet the task.
So this past weekend I set about searching for answers those two questions. I am a backpack person - I use a backpack for my professional work (as opposed to a briefcase, for example), and have routinely used them for carrying sports gear, travel, etc - if you can get everything you need for a trip into a backpack it’s a lot easier to navigate thru the airport. What this means, ultimately, is that I have a backpack or two that I could apply to this purpose.
The first thing I tried to sort out was what the best way would be to array things on the back of the trike. I played with the idea of setting one backpack upright and the other flat:
Nope
But this really seemed to take up too much horizontal space. The upright bag was not on the rack - it was sitting between the seat frame and the rack on the top of the fender. And the rear bag was hanging off of the back. I briefly thought about fashioning an extension for the rack in each direction - I have some aluminum tubing left over from the framing of the child trailer that I built my DIY trailer from. I played with that idea long enough to do an Amazon search for tubing benders and such, but then decided maybe I should just try stacking them and lashing them down with bungees.
And that worked:
Stacked up
(I replaced the orange backpack in the first picture - which is my work backpack that I grabbed initially because it was handy for thinking things thru - with a red Lands End one that I had in the closet). Both backpacks are bungeed down - e.g. I put the bottom one on the rack, bungeed it down, and then put the red one on top of it and strapped it down. The bottom one has my sleeping bag and sleeping pad in it, as well as the two battery packs I will take along; and the top one has the clothing I would take along on the trip. I have a tent for the trip as well, but I’d set it up inside to allow it to air out, so I put an electronics bag (cords, adapters, etc) that weighs about the same as the tent does into the top bag to simulate it’s weight. I weighed the two backpacks (of course), and together they came out to 16.9 lbs. I oriented the top backpack backwards so that the red material would face oncoming traffic for visibility. And I did have to move one of my rear flashers from the neckrest handle to the backpacks so it could be seen.
In the panniers I always have extra tubes, a patch kit, and tools. I put a couple of extra bottles of water, which I would plan to carry for the ride as well. They also still have my winter support gear - extra layers of clothing, some chemical warmers and such - in them. I left that in them to simulate the remaining items that I do not have yet - e.g. a small cook stove, food, and a first aid kit. I suspect the winter gear is a little lighter than those items will be, but not a lot. But with all of this the trike was definitely heavier. I often pick it up by the rear rack to wheel it out of the garage and turn it around, and that was noticeably harder than it usually is.
With all that in place I headed out for a test ride.
I wanted a route that was a little further distance - I wanted to have a sufficient length of time to get a real feel for the extra weight and how the stacked backpacks would behave. I picked a 21.5 mile route with a few hills on it. It’s also one of the only routes I have that also has a short section of gravel on it (which I usually avoid like the plague). The gravel section is poorly maintained:
Hero Gravel
Which is to say that its mostly a dirt road with a bit of gravel residue on it - the sort of road sometimes referred to as “hero gravel”. Much of the Hennepin Canal trail is more or less this sort of surface. I think it’s described as “crushed stone”, but if that’s true, that was one heck of a crusher… At any rate, it was an opportunity to ride it on a bit of surface similar to what I’d be encountering on the trip.
All in all, it went pretty well. The extra weight was detectable, but not terribly so. I could see the backpacks in my mirrors, and they did noticeably sway back and forth in synchrony with my pedaling motion. However, they stayed in place very well - there was no real shifting during the ride, and they looked to be in essentially the same place at the end as they were in the beginning. As long as the lighter weight items - like clothing - are at the top I think the arrangement will be fine for a longer trip.
I’ve ridden this route once before, and my time on the route this time was slower, but only by slightly over two minutes. Speed for it was 13.11 mph, down from 13.4 on the prior ride. This may have been abetted somewhat by a lower wind speed - 0 wind for this day, compared to a 10 mph on the prior ride - and the fact that I have my Windwrap fairing on the trike (which I’m anticipating leaving on for the Hennepin ride as well).
Overall this suggests that I should be able to get everything on the back of the trike, and that the additional weight shouldn't slow me down too much. This feels like proof of concept for packing on the trike itself as opposed to buying a new trailer.
The next thing to consider is whether I just go with the bags I have for this trip, or whether I shell out for something purpose-built, like the aforementioned Ortlieb setup. I go back and forth on that. New bags are pricey, but there’s a get-what-you-pay-for factor with them - they are waterproof and designed to work together. I’d need to pack stuff in garbage bags and/or figure out how to set up a small tarp over the backpacks to hedge against rain otherwise. I think if I was certain that I’m going to enjoy the camping component it would be a no-brainer to go ahead and get them, because I’d want to do more of it going forward. But if 50-ish me finds that he doesn’t enjoy sleeping on the ground the way that my 20 and 30 year old self did, I’ll have laid out the cash for something I won’t really use again.
So - continued thinking required.