I have recently found myself feeling a lot more .com than .co.nz, if you know what I mean. Before we settled in NZ, we always considered ourselves global citizens who did not really belong to any one country but who moved around to live in interesting places. If the city or country did not measure up, we simply moved.

This all changed when we settled and decided to engage with a place. I started to care about what happened to my city and became involved with trying to improve things, but recently I have noticed this attachment disappearing. I have a huge respect for those people who can sustain the constant drive to embed some common sense and rational thinking into civic decisions that are so often made based on egos, politician nonsense, and the outdated beliefs of dinosaurs that have past their ‘use by’ date. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I am not one of those amazing people. I have lost some of my .co.nz allegiance and am slowly returning to my .com former self. I read a book last week that said that traveling was much like a love affair – at the end of the road, it’s like breaking up. You lose interest and no longer want to make the effort; you start to imagine life without the other person (place) and make plans for your new reality. When traveling, obviously when you reach this point of disinterest, it’s time to go home. However, we seem to be ‘breaking up’ with our .co.nz-ness. Perhaps these things are cyclic and it will return at the end of our Trip. When I started this new Cyclopolitan website, it seemed natural to make it a .com url as I figured it might have a more global appeal compared to the Cycling in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch .co.nz websites that are obviously place specific.  Perhaps it is just a natural leaning towards my shiny new .com website.

However, talking about the trip …

The trailers have arrived and I am very pleased with them. They are beautifully manufactured and very well designed. They are bigger than I expected but that might just be because I am looking at them in my apartment rather than outside – I often find that things look bigger when I get them in the apartment. This is especially the case when I look at items in a big box store where there are no ‘rooms’ but just one vast open space. Most of the furniture is very large and designed for suburban open plan McMansions rather than bijoux inner city living in a heritage apartment.

I was right … I’m just putting it out there but … I was right. If you remember, there was a difference of opinion about which duffle bag would be the best size to fit inside the trailers. I thought the medium and the Husband thought the large would be best. So when the trailers arrived, we took one around to Bivouac for a ‘fitting’. The medium duffle fits very nicely with a small amount of room left for the tent (in the Husbands trailer) and food/cooking gear (in my trailer). Luckily the Bivouac staff are used to us now and have got their heads around the idea of Cyclopolitans on a gap year. The same cannot be said for some of the staff in other stores who seem to be stuck in a ‘fluoro, sweating, cycle touring’ mode when ever the word ‘bicycles’ enters the conversation.

This new turn of events means that I am going to rethink the Brompton touring (T) bag for the front of the bicycle. I originally picked it due to it’s large capacity but I think that the trailer is going to be plenty big enough for me. The front bag can now really just hold valuables, camera, a cardigan and a water bottle. This allows me to get one of the much more styley sort that can double as an everyday bag to throw all my essentials in for ‘doing’ a museum or cafe. Now which one should I go for ….

From NYC Wheels

We also recently bought a pot set for cooking with. It’s a nifty little set with two pots and a lid. We also bought a small kettle/tea pot, which is of course essential when one is British and which happily fits neatly inside the smaller pot. We pretty much run on a good cup of tea and it has been known to fix all manor of sticky situations. I have also found on the Internet that there are dishes that fit inside the pot set as well so I will order these next week and then I think we are pretty much there for eating equipment.

You can see the growing list of items we are taking (either already purchased, waiting for the sale, or already own) on my Pinterest board.