The morning schedule looks something like this: Stagger around in search of coffee. Having secured some, retire to window seat to check morning’s latest happenings. Quickly become too depressed to continue looking at news, read something bike-related.
This morning I found an article on bikepacking.com about a trip across one the most remote stretches available in a mostly english-speaking country: the 1300 kilometre Anne Beadell highway from Laverton in Western Australia to Coober Pedy in SA.
Highway doesn’t really describe the road Dylan Kentch took, and that he made 90 to 100 kilometres a day on the sandy and corrugated track is pretty impressive. Of course, if he didn’t make that distance he would have run out of everything, because there is not much out there besides sand and corrugations.
I really enjoyed reading Dylan’s story, and a couple of lines caught my eye.
One was a casual aside he made while discussing minor technical difficulties he had with his gear shifting. His comment was that he never uses the lowest gear on any bike. I can think of worse rules to live by.
The other sentence that got my attention was the one where he says that he purposely didn’t bring three items into the Outback for a two-week trip: a stove, a raincoat, and a chamois.
Wondering what his get-up would look like, I was stoked to find a photo further down the story showing his shorts of choice: Dobies! There is no further information in the article about hygiene, cooking, or saddle amenities, so I can’t tell whether that was a good idea or not.
He did confess to removing his Dobies around camp, and as he was wearing them commando style (i.e. nothing underneath them) he would be strutting around starkers. Which is of course no problem when you are the only human in miles and miles.
But fossicking through the orders on the Nzo website I found Dylan’s in March 2021, so he had plenty of time to decide whether the Dobies would be the thing for the job.
We get requests for sponsorship from people planning a return trip to the local shops. So finding a story about an expedition like this with one of our products in it because its owner selected it, bought it, and caned it for a year or so before using it on his voyage makes us very happy.
The last thing I do each October morning before wandering into the office is my personal bit of daily art in honour of Inktober. This morning’s piece is based on two images from Dylan’s story. Thanks for the inspiration, Dylan, looking forward to the next instalment.