Issue 153 Bikepacking: Spend Time Not Money

Amanda and Rhys spend their summer holiday discovering that cheap really can be cheerful.

Words Amanda Photography Rhys Wainwright & Amanda

In summer 2022 we crammed two enduro bikes and two gravel bikes into our VW T5 and headed for the Alps. For just over a fortnight we drove to new riding locations, parked up at a tolerable altitude for our uninsulated van to be cool enough to sleep in, and bought so many lift passes for bike parks that the bill for those alone was in the region of £500. Add to that our fuel bill, toll roads, eating out, and all the other holiday spends, it cost a fortune. It was the best holiday either of us had ever been on, but we had not anticipated it costing quite so much to ride our bikes, especially given that we had no accommodation costs.

Planning our 2023 summer holiday seemed like a no-brainer. We would plan to do the same again but spend less money. We started a list of places we wanted to visit, with a vast reduction in mileage by spending longer in each location. We would cook more meals, make packed lunches, and maybe use the gravel bikes more because we wouldn’t need a lift pass on those rides. We hoped to sort the insulation out on the van, too, which would save us having to drive up to about 1,500m every night for cooler temperatures.

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Off with a bang and a clatter

Six weeks before our trip, the van suffered a catastrophic failure. Rhys was furious with himself for slacking on maintenance, a role he naturally assigned himself given his mechanical experience, while I secretly felt relief at the prospect of not being able to drive around the Alps again this summer rinsing my, already quite dry, bank account.

I was calmed by the situation with the van. Our busy lives were stalled; we couldn’t commit to the usual vanlife weekends, races, summer trips… My life needed a change of pace and it came at just the right time. I loosely suggested that we use our time off to have a proper go at bikepacking since we did a two-week trip in February where we managed to carry our sleeping equipment across Spain without using it once, just airing it out in a series of nice hotels along the way. True to form, Rhys took an idea and engineered it into a plan that had the potential to take all the fun out of it, but given that the loss of our van had a far bigger impact on his life than mine, I decided to play the game. I said yes to an epic Alps traverse from Geneva to Nice… and back again.

Rhys found a couple of well-travelled routes online and pieced our journey together. The Grand Alpine Traverse would take us south (a route that will soon become The Alps Divide race), and the Route des Grande Alpes back north again.

Counting in marmots, paced by benches

For two weeks we pedalled our bikes to places you can’t reach by van or chairlift. We camped under the stars, the perfect temperature every night. We cooked all our meals together while recapping on our day, talking about how many marmots we’d seen, or which dog had been the cutest. Some evenings we’d splash out on a €10 per night campsite and wash our clothes.

The pace was dictated by the size of the mountains we were passing over each day, how technical the terrain, how elaborate our cooking plans were, or how long we needed to fully digest the views. It’s previously unheard of for Rhys to get to the top of a mountain and be excited about spotting a perfectly positioned bench – he always wants to keep moving. But we sat on the tourist benches, we got the camera out, we cooked pasta halfway up a climb, explored ruined buildings and we even had time to make friends with another bikepacking couple. One of the most valuable things we learnt along the way was that the less money spent on the day, the more quality time we spent together.

Maybe we could all benefit from slowing the pace down and just enjoying the ride.