Specific, Special, Travel Gear

When you’re planning for a long bike tour, or even a two-week backpacking trip, it’s easy to feel the need to buy a lot of specialized gear. Stuff that packs small, dries fast, has multiple uses. This kind of stuff is expensive, and mostly unnecessary. And if you buy specific-purpose, lame-ass travel clothing like zip-away, convertible pants, you’ll look like a loser too.

One of the mistakes I made was buying camping cookware. I got the MSR Blacklite Classic Cookset for about $30. Two pots. The smaller one fits inside the larger, and it features a non-stick coating, etc, whatever. It was definitely useful, but after splitting up with Ryan, I went to a thrift store to look for a smaller size pot, and they had loads of great, small, lightweight pots for about $2. Stupid-waste-of-money, camping-specific cookware. I sold the MSR cookset later on eBay.

Travel- and camping-specific clothing is the worst. Getting some microfiber t-shirt that advertises some stupid fabric technology name like CoolMax, WickSaver, or DriFast. They cost like $40 and look shitty. Lame plain solid color, slinky weird material shirt. When you travel, you want to look normal and feel normal. Use what you already have.