Jblewi wrote:Hi, no fixed date yet, my surly troll frame set arrives at the end of the month so when that's built and the funds are raised. Realistically two years I guess! Is your troll going to be for your trip?

Ha! Yes. Can't believe you are also getting a Troll...! I'm really tempted by an Ogre but would like to think that the bike will take me places where 29er parts are not so common. My loose plan is to basically copy the kind of setup Cass Gilbert uses - mostly bikepacking gear but probably with a rear rack and two small panniers - I just can't see how I'll have the space for gear for such a long trip without the panniers. Do you have a spec for your build?

That's why I went for the troll, 29er parts are not as common outside of Europe and that states.

I don't have a spec yet, got some ideas but nothing fully planned. I'm learning all the way and am fairly new to cycling, just searching through other people's specs and looking at the parts that come up more than once.

Do you have any route plans?

Cool. If you haven't come across it yet, Cass' blog While Out Ridingis a pretty useful source of info on a long distance Troll build, particularly this page. There was other info on there but he's updated the blog recently and I can't find it.

Routes are my problem at the moment. I've read enough from people riding in all sorts of places to make me want to go everywhere! I love the idea of riding out of my front door and covering big distances on a map, and of making a journey - hopefully riding back to my front door. But I know that I much prefer riding off road to on road, which means going much, much slower. So at the moment I'm not totally sure whether to set off from home with the aim of carrying on til I get back, or whether to specifically go and seek out mountain bike routes, perhaps not making a continuous journey - for example, there is heaps of great stuff in the US, so one option is to just head straight there. I worry a little that the trip would lose some of its 'purpose' (as much as it has any) if I just start hopping on planes to places...

So at the moment I have a really big map to put up on the wall, upon which I'm going to mark down places I want to go / have read about and I'm going to see if anything jumps out at me. The simplest option is just to start by heading to France and picking up the long distance 'GR' footpath routes and taking it from there...

Sounds good, thanks very much for the website pointer, it's really helpful.

We're finding that politics dictates out route more that anything once outside Europe!

Here's one of Mr Fish having breakfast at the Bothy we found just south of Aber


FF at the Bothy by fantasticmrmatt, on Flickr

A slight frost at 05.30