Barney has taken the – if not impossible – then wildly ill-advised step of actually taking his young kids bikepacking. Read on for some abject lessons in what not to do…

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY BARNEY MARSH

UK ADVENTURE

Ah, bikepacking! The lure of the open trail! Of long arduous climbs and long, sweeping singletrack descents just before you unravel your bivvy bag beside a babbling stream on a glorious summer evening. Then it’s a simple matter of cooking industrial quantities of quinoa and lentils to hoover up before cracking open the port and a fine selection of cheeses before settling down to a nicely tipsy snooze.

A rough approximation of this is no doubt the image that many of you will harbour about the joys of this increasingly fashionable pursuit. Others, perhaps, will fixate on the training possibilities inherent in carting all your own gear with you. The rufty-tufty ‘alone with the wilderness’ image. And still others may pooh-pooh the idea as simply rebadged cycle touring for the unbearably hip and probably bearded.

But what of the average family type person? The adventurer who loves the idea of escaping into the wilds, but yearns to share the experience with their own little people? Or perhaps, who can’t sweet-talk the other half into shouldering the entire burden of bedtime?

Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s perfectly possible – as long as you remember a few key rules. These essentially boil down to forgetting everything that made bikepacking fun in the first place, and ensuring that you have sufficient improvisational skills to make totally arbitrary decisions on the most pointless of ‘critical decisions’ on the spot. But then, that’s what parenting is all about, right? This aspect of it just has more bike wheels, and fewer home comforts.

So, in a series of foolish and ill-advised experiments, I have taken my children bikepacking. There will be some among you who will react with incredulity – there are certainly enough of those people in the real world. My eldest, Eliza, is barely old enough (they thought) for this sort of thing. She’s six. She can ride a bike pretty well (although she’s not big on hills. Or straight lines, for that matter) and she’s keen as mustard. The spirit of the adventurer courses through her veins – either that or pure liqueThed jelly babies.

Equally keen (or at least voluble), but somewhat less skilled in the bike riding department, is my youngest, Alis, who is three. Alis rides with me, on my bike, thanks to a contraption called a Mac Ride. The combination of Mac Ride and Alis adds a not inconsiderable amount of weight to an unladen bike, which leads me nicely to my first point.