It’s the Little Things: 12 Small Joys of Bikepacking

Header photo by Greg McCahon

There are countless reasons to fall in love with bikepacking, from the freedom of traveling under your own steam to the satisfaction of carrying everything you need and the thrill of connecting a pair of unknown points on a map. But some of the best reasons are also the smallest: A meal that tastes impossibly delicious after a long day in the saddle. An incredible campsite when you need it most. An impromptu invitation to join a stranger for tea on a rainy day.

After a couple of decades of traveling by bike, I’ve come to realize that it’s truly the small things that accentuate a trip and stay with us the longest. Bikepacking has a way of sharpening the senses and stripping away the distractions of daily life, and it can make even the most ordinary of experiences feel unexpectedly meaningful. This piece celebrates those small victories, pleasures, and discoveries. Find my list of 12 little joys of bikepacking below.

Food Tastes Better

Let’s start with one of the most universally relatable delights of bikepacking: During a long day of pedaling, everything tends to taste better. Decent food becomes great, and great food can border on divine. Whether it’s a sugary mid-ride snack or a hearty meal at camp, even foods you wouldn’t normally gravitate toward have a way of unexpectedly hitting the spot.

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Sure, Snickers bars and freeze-dried packet meals will fuel your ride and taste great amid the exertion of a bike trip. But even a pinch of extra thought given to preparing a delicious meal is usually rewarded many times over—whether that’s packing a small container of your must-have condiment, foraging berries or mushrooms (with care!) along your route, or cooking a travel-friendly version of a favorite recipe.

Food is a portal to connection with the places we ride through, and since taste seems to be among the most heightened senses while bikepacking, there’s all the more reason to stop and savor the local flavors. Surprising as it might sound, one of the best things I’ve ever eaten was a heaping plate of fresh-picked tomatoes with salt from a roadside farmstand while bikepacking across the Balkans. It doesn’t take much!

Using Everything You Packed

I’ll never forget how hilariously overpacked I was on my first long bike trip. My four jumbo Ortlieb panniers were bursting with unnecessary items, including a pair of jeans, casual shoes, and a couple of button-up shirts just in case. After a few days of laboring up hills—bike groaning and racks creaking with each pedal stroke—I ended up sending half of my things back home. As the trip went on, I realized I didn’t miss any of it.

These days, I’m more likely to skimp out and regret the things I didn’t bring, but there’s a balance to be found between depriving yourself and hauling far too much. Striking it can be a challenge, but few things are as satisfying as getting it exactly right and using every item you brought along. The perfect pack list is often only realized in retrospect, but what a joy it is to have those tweezers, water filter, thin gloves, or third tubeless plug when you need them most.

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Related, when you’ve packed just right, you get to experience the glee of your loaded bike getting lighter between resupply stops. Starting with bags packed to the gills and barely closing, it’s delightful to notice how everything slowly starts to fit better as consumables are used up and gear finds its perfect place. You know you’re approaching packing bliss when you can roll your seatpack a couple of extra times and your frame bag’s zipper finally closes without coercion.

Interacting with Locals

Much has been written about the kindness of strangers in the context of bikepacking. This comes as no surprise. Ask any seasoned bicycle traveler, and they’ll have a story about a home-cooked meal, a night spent camping in someone’s garden, or a far larger gesture of hospitality they experienced on the road. Whether you’re on a quick getaway close to home or traversing a country on the other side of the globe, a kitted-out bike often attracts interested locals. Unplanned moments shared with them can make for the fondest memories of any trip.

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Not only does arriving in a town or village on a bikepacking rig offer a built-in conversation starter for anyone curious to chat, but it also puts you face-to-face with the world in a way you completely miss out on when seeing it from behind a windshield or while zooming past at 30,000 feet. Use your best judgment, of course, but in my experience, the vulnerability that comes with traveling by bike has a way of opening doors and revealing the inherent goodness in people.

The Freedom of Self-Reliance

“The Freedom of Self-Reliance” is the fourth item on this list, but it’s a clear contender for most consequential. To travel on a loaded bicycle is to have all you need to get by for days or weeks on end, untethered. Bikepacking is knowing you’re equipped to problem-solve and figure it all out. It’s relying on your own power for propulsion, creating your own itinerary, and stopping when and where you want, changing plans on a whim if you so desire.

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This combination is incredibly empowering, and a genuine passion for sharing the unmatched feeling of traveling self-sustained has helped drive this site for a decade and a half. At varying times and in different parts of the world, each of us on the team had our own aha moment when we understood the not-so-small joy of life on the bike. Even a night or weekend away on your own terms can be more than enough to fill your cup. More on that later.

Getting to Know Your Gear

By nature, bikepacking is a fairly gear-heavy endeavor. Still, as I wrote about in The Problem with N+1 last year, that doesn’t mean constantly acquiring bags and components needs to be central to the activity—quite the contrary. Getting new gear can be a thrill in the moment, but even more enjoyable is the satisfaction of becoming deeply acquainted with the gear you already own. Trusting your gear and knowing how to use it offers valuable peace of mind in the backcountry.

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There’s something gratifying about being able to set up your shelter in half the time it took you on the first attempt, then halving that time again after a few dozen nights out, by which point you know its quirks and have some tricks of your own. No need to read the manual or watch a YouTube video. It feels good to know exactly how long it takes your stove to boil water, which pieces of gear fit best in which bags, and when it’s time to service your trusty suspension fork by feel. For me, familiarity will always beat novelty in the long run, which is likely why I’m still using the same spork two decades later and typically only develop a connection to objects through regular use.

The Simplicity of the Routine

Traveling by bike offers an alternative to the hustle and noise of everyday life. It pares down your daily agenda to the uncomplicated groove of “ride, camp, repeat.” No appointments to race between, no deadlines to stress over hitting, no emails or Slack messages to answer.

Having a schedule that consists only of riding until you decide to stop tends to free up precious headspace and help you tune in to a slower frequency. I wrote about being fully present for a sunset in The Beauty of Not Pedaling, an experience I almost surely wouldn’t have thought to make time for on a normal Tuesday—a somewhat painful truth.

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Bikepacking invites you to single-task. To watch wildlife. To sit and listen to a creek. To slowly sip your morning coffee. To go to bed early or sleep late. There’s no wrong way to enjoy the beautiful simplicity of a bike trip, even if that means thinking or doing nothing extraordinary at all.

Forging Friendships

Having a shared passion is a great way to meet people, and for the bikepacking-obsessed among us, there’s no shortage of topics to discuss and bond over. Whether it’s recalling stories of past trips, scheming up future exploits, or debating the merits of different wheel sizes and handlebar widths, talking shop is an easy road to new friends and riding partners.

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Out on the trail, days of pedaling and evenings sitting around the campfire offer uninterrupted time for conversation, meaning a Saturday and Sunday away can act like a fast-forward button for a new friendship. Mark Twain wrote, “There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them,” and he was right. Thankfully, shared effort and misadventures usually foster connection.

Among the many small gifts bikepacking has given me, I cherish the network of friends I’ve made through various riding groups, trips, and events. A like-minded philosophy of travel gives us common ground despite a breadth of ages, beliefs, occupations, geographies, and other interests, making those connections all the more meaningful. Bicycles unite!

The Ease of Quick Getaways

The power of a quick trip can’t be overstated, and one special thing about bikepacking is that it enables you to cram an entire adventure into less than 24 hours. A brief escape beyond the city does wonders for the mind and body. With some planning, for many of us, it’s possible to get away after work, ride to a quiet spot, sleep under the stars, and be back at the office in the morning—maybe a little sleepy and dirty but riding a unique high nonetheless.

A midweek escape is understandably not in the cards for everyone, but the point I want to stress is that you don’t need to cash in a year’s worth of vacation to reap the full benefits of bikepacking. Its easy accessibility is one of its many advantages; a night or weekend away is plenty of time for an experience that delivers the full range of emotions and sensations.

Finding the Perfect Campsite

Sometimes, after many hours of riding (and perhaps pushing) your heavy bike, it can be tempting to find any old flat spot to call home for the night. I’ve been there. But what an absolute treat it is to reach that point mentally and then convince yourself to continue on just a little farther, only to round a bend and find a picture-perfect place to spend the night. Big views, a log for sitting, trees spaced just right for hanging a hammock, maybe a small stream for filling bottles and white noise.

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Knowing you’ve found “the spot” is a small but significant triumph of any day out. You can sleep well knowing it was worth all the work to get there and look forward to finding fresh details to appreciate in the morning light. Some spots are so good that you’ll still think about them and be able to transport yourself there years later—another gift that continues giving well beyond the trip’s end.

Escaping the Typical Tourist Circuit

Let me be clear: As bikepackers, we’re not above tourists. We are tourists, but our nimble vehicles enable us to see places in a singular way. It’s a privilege to experience the in-betweens and lesser-known spots from the saddle, whether that’s a tiny town off the well-trodden path or a forgotten byway that offers a parallel but far more scenic alternative to the freshly paved, heavily trafficked thoroughfare.

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With the right mindset, all travel can be impactful and informative, but there’s a unique richness to trips taken by bike. It’s still on you to be open to the world and engage your receptors, but bikepacking’s slow pace and unguarded nature offer unmatched opportunities to get to know a place through its characters and contours. It can be confronting at times, but one unmistakable joy of bicycle travel is that it offers a distinctly lived experience of every mile covered.

Making a Trailside Repair that Holds

Travel on two wheels enough, and sooner or later, something will go so wrong that it feels trip-ending. Unfortunately, it can happen even before your ride begins. But when things look bad, and you manage to hack together a solution with some combination of luck and ingenuity, congratulations, you’ve unlocked yet another small joy of bikepacking!

Whether it’s sewing your sidewall back together with a needle and thread, transforming your drivetrain into a makeshift singlespeed, or using hand gestures and a few broken words of the local language to ask if anyone is handy with a welder, mitigating a potential disaster and being able to continue your journey is a little victory worth celebrating—especially once you arrive at your ultimate destination, much to your own surprise and delight.

Successfully Connecting the Dots

Lastly, regardless if you’re about to complete one of our hundreds of established bikepacking routes or are just cranking up a little section of local trail in hopes that it pops you out where you think it will, there’s an immense sense of accomplishment to be discovered in successfully finishing what you started and linking two points on the map.

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Seeing a challenging endeavor through to the end can be uplifting and encouraging, whether it’s arriving back home after your first quick overnighter or wrapping up your latest multi-week loop. During and after any trip, bikepacking provides little rushes of confidence and joy. It offers up regular reminders that you are, in fact, capable of doing hard things, and the boost that comes with overcoming your nerves and apprehensions is part and parcel of the experience. Embrace it!

Thanks for reading. What did I miss? What small joys of bikepacking do you appreciate most? In hopes that this piece can serve as an inspiring resource for future bikepackers, please share your input in the Conversation below!

Further Reading

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