On packing light, and failing

Everyone tells you to pack light. I told myself to pack light. I read the forums where lean, sun-creased people list their kit down to the gram and refer to a toothbrush handle as "an opportunity." I nodded along. I bought the small tent. And then I left Lisbon carrying, among other things, a hardback novel, a second pair of jeans, a French press, and a folding chair, because I had decided that I was a person who would want to sit down comfortably in the evenings. Reader, I have not once missed a chair I could not carry.

The reckoning came in Bordeaux. I'd limped the last forty kilometres into the city with a rear pannier sagging like a wet sandbag, and somewhere on the long flat run up the Garonne I finally did the maths that I'd been avoiding for a thousand kilometres: every gram I was carrying, I was carrying up every hill between here and the Caspian Sea. The chair was no longer a chair. It was a tax, payable in advance, on every climb I had left.

The post office on the Rue du Palais

So I found a post office, bought the largest box they sold, and held a small private funeral on the pavement outside. Into the box went the jeans, the hardback (finished, thankfully), the French press, the chair, a spare set of brake pads I'd convinced myself were "just in case," and a frankly criminal quantity of cables for devices I no longer owned. The clerk weighed it, told me the price with a perfectly straight face, and I paid it gladly. It was the most expensive lesson of the trip and worth every euro.

I mailed a box of "essentials" home, and the bike forgave me before I'd left the city limits.

The difference was not subtle. I rolled out of Bordeaux the next morning and the bike felt like a different machine — it accelerated when I asked it to, it leaned into corners instead of arguing with them, and the first small rise out of town went by almost before I'd noticed it. I'd spent six weeks blaming my legs for what was, all along, the weight of a chair.

I'd love to tell you I've learned the lesson for good. I haven't. Two days later in a market in Marmande I bought a heavy ceramic bowl because it was beautiful, and it is currently wrapped in a sock in my left pannier, and I have no intention of mailing it home. Pack light, the people say. I'm trying. I'm just also, apparently, a person who needs one beautiful bowl.