Bikes have come and gone as frequently as my reasons for riding them. So here you’ll find my ‘bikeography’ – a list of the bikes I’ve used during my bicycle adventuring career.
As well as being a bit of fun, I hope it’ll help you discern which of the many approaches to equipping yourself is most relevant to you at this moment in time, and avoid some of the (many) mistakes I’ve made along the way.
2003–2005: The Hardtail
Having spent a typical British university fresher’s year getting fat, I bought a second hand mountain bike from the now defunct Sidwell Cycles in Exeter in order to burn it all off.
My purchase of the blue Trek 4300, for which I paid £200, was inspired by my housemate Mark, and together we took delight in chucking ourselves down the trails of the nearby Abbey Woods.
Feeling limited by how far it was possible to cycle in a day and return home before dark, we started dreaming up longer and more ambitious mountain bike trips. But they never happened. We were students. We were too lazy.
2005–2006: The Full-Sus
It was only after graduating and really having nothing to do that plans became reality. Convinced that the Trek was unfit for a ride across the Scottish Highlands, I sold it and bought a Mongoose Teocali Comp. It was was a great mountain bike – and it couldn’t have been less suited to touring.
I hadn’t heard of panniers or racks. So I strapped my camping gear to the frame, shouldered a backpack, and the three of us embarked on what would be the most miserable and painful week of our lives, inadvertently inventing “bikepacking” before it was a word.
At the end of the trip, of course, we all decided we’d had so much fun that a much longer and more ambitious trip was in order for the following year.
2007–2011: The Frankenbike
From cycling across Scotland, the next logical step was to attempt to cycle round the world. High on the success of our Scottish adventure, we decided that to do it off-road would be fun too.
We scoured the mountain bike industry for the most durable components on the market. We’d also noticed lots of off-road tourers using cargo trailers. So we got some of those as well. Then we built our own bikes, based on the Kona Explosif cromoly hardtail frame.
The resulting three-wheeled monsters were about as nimble as elephants wearing boxing gloves.
Then we discovered that cycling on road was by far the best way to meet people and thus actually have fun. I spent the next three years dragging this beast fifteen thousand miles at a speed a friend wrote to tell me would take eight years to cycle round the world.
2012: The Roadster
I got sidetracked from riding round the planet, gave up all hope of ever getting a real job, and ended up in Canada. Here I paid another visit to the nice people at Kona Bikes, who gave me and my brother two of their flagship Sutra road tourers.
It was a beautiful bike; the 2012 model especially so, and I rode it down the U.S. West Coast to California, wishing I’d ridden a bike like this across Europe five years ago instead of Frankenbike.
For road-based touring, that 2012 Sutra wasn’t far short of perfection.
2013: The ‘Bent
Leaving the Sutra at my new second home in Armenia, I found myself back in Europe without a touring bike at all. Then a nice bloke from the Netherlands offered me his recumbent, which was going spare. I’d always wanted to try a recumbent.
The only condition was that I pick it up from his house. So I hacked enough credit card signup bonuses to get a free business class flight to Amsterdam, whereupon the Dutchman shook my hand and gave me a Challenge Hurricane and a set of luggage to go with it.
Since I was in the world’s most cycle-friendly country, I figured the best way to learn to actually ride the recumbent would be to pedal it back to England, rather than fly home. So that’s what I did.
2014: Charlie
Taking up residence in Bristol and volunteering in a bike recycling workshop, I began work on an idea I’d been discussing with an Irishman on an uninhabited island the previous summer.
The idea was to put together a touring bike and a full set of equipment for as little money as possible. As little money as possible turned out to be £25.17. The goal was to prove – really prove – that you don’t need lots of money to go on a cycling adventure.
To further hammer this point home, I then rode my salvaged Ridgeback Adventure the length of England, and most of Midlothian for good measure, on a total budget of 25p, before giving it away to a South African who christened the bike Charlie and sent it off across Asia.
2015–present: The Expedition
Having given away the Ridgeback, I found myself grabbing Frankenbike again so I could ride around Central Europe for a bit.
While I rode, I found myself dreaming up a recipe for the ‘ultimate world touring bike’. It would incorporate all I’d learned (and avoid all the mistakes I’d made) in the years since that first adventure across Scotland.
Unlike most vanilla touring bikes, it would be designed for touring literally anywhere in the world for an indefinite amount of time. Serendipitously, I happened across a bike builder who agreed not only to build said dream bike, but also start building them for other people too!
Read more about the full specifications and details of Tom’s Expedition Bike, which I continue to ride today.
2019: Frankenbike Resurrected
In 2019 I almost bought a new bikepacking rig… until I was reminded by a friend that I had a perfectly good bike for the job already: that 2007 Kona Explosif that had once been so mercilessly overbuilt and dragged halfway around the planet.
A bit of welding, a lick of paint, a few new components, and a set of frame luggage, and this classic cromoly hardtail was ready to go. I then proceeded to ride it 800km off-road the length of Armenia (for the first but not the last time).
2024: The Outlander
Having volunteered and spectated at the first edition of the Ascend Armenia bikepacking race, I decided I would enter it in 2024. This clearly called for a new bike – my first in nearly a decade.
Once again, this was the brainchild of Richard at Oxford Bike Works. Although he’s designed the Outlander as a cromo-framed gravel/touring bike, I figured it could be configured suit lightweight bikepacking too. So I loaded it up with frame bags and a handlebar harness and began to ride.
Which brings us to today.
Is there ever any end to a bicycle addict’s series of fixes? I suspect there isn’t. So you can be pretty sure this page will just keep getting longer.
And now you’ve finished browsing the contents of my bike shed, why not read about how to choose the bike that’ll best suit your trip?