We’re now in Split and our Croation “holiday” is about to come to an end. We’ve really enjoyed the chilled out speed we’ve been going at for the last few weeks, but it’s now time to pick up the pace and fit in some more adventure!

From here we intend to cycle down the coast for a hundred kilometres or so before heading inland to Bosnia and then on to Montenegro. This means lots of mountains, and if we’re going to do it we need to shed some weight. No, we’re not thinking of eating less pastries (heaven forbid), we’re talking about making some hard decisions about shedding some gear.

From reading other people’s blogs it seems that most cyclists on long tours eventually find themselves needing to do this, and are faced with the inevitable trade off between being able to enjoy the creature comforts stashed in away in their panniers and the inevitable strain these produce on the knees up those 14% inclines.

For me, the desire to shed weight has ebbed and flowed throughout the journey. Generally, as I’m riding up a hill, I’m thinking of chucking the lot in the ocean, but when it’s bucketing down, I want a bigger tent and more warm clothes!

However, the time has come and we’ve finally done it.

Some of the decisions have been really easy – for example at one stage I found myself carrying 8 bottles of grappa and 1/2 a litre of truffle oil as a result of present purchasing gone wrong (who knew you can’t send liquids through the mail). We’ve dealt with this problem relatively easily (although our livers might disagree!).

Other decisions have been much harder, as although we haven’t exactly travelled light, we’ve also used all of our gear on a regular basis.

After much debate this is what we’ve got rid of.

The cull means that we can no longer use our tarp if there are no trees (goodbye MSR poles), we can no longer sit up in bed (goodbye to our lovely exped chair kits), we no longer have a ground sheet (hello wet bums), we can no longer lock our panniers to our bikes (we’ve got very slack anyway), we now have one burner (goodbye complicated camp meals), I can no longer pretend to speak German,  we can’t play canasta (which was hard anyway given it was a four player game) and Ally has a lot less fashion accessories (luckily she looks pretty good without them).

Damn, I hope that it adds up to four or five kilos and that we’ll actually notice the difference when we hop on the bikes tomorrow!

For those interested here’s what we carry each (prior to the cull)

Matt:

Ally: