The Mule gets a Makeover

"The Mule", AKA the Specialized Rockhopper Expert MTB that M1 uses for bikepacking and general transport (M1 doesn't have a car) has had a good life. Don't worry. The Mule is not dead.

The Mule has seen nine European countries, and rolled through farmland, along coastlines, through wetlands teeming with wildlife and over several significant mountain ranges including the Swiss Alps and the Pyrenees. Not bad for an entry level bike that cost £700 eight years ago.

And The Mule has proved to be a very reliable machine for bikepacking, too. Over the four European bikepacking trips that The Mule has undertaken, nearly 7500 miles have been cycled, heavily laden. And that's not including the trips The Mule has done in the UK, either for bikepacking or more generally. And in all that time, the only mechanical failure has been a single broken spoke in Spain in 2022. The Mule hasn't even had a puncture in those European trips (although an inner tube did fail once; not technically a puncture).

It's a pretty good record. This excellent reliability record is to be explained in part by the fact that M1 services the bikes once a year and replaces components whenever necessary (and sometimes "just in case"). And of course, using good quality components is a factor too. That said, relatively cheap KMC chains are usually selected and close to bottom of the range SRAM cassettes. Key to the absence of punctures are the Continental Contact Plus tyres that we use on both The Mule and Bikey McBike Face, M2's bike. They're brilliant.

But, The Mule is not immune to wear and tear. On returning from this year's trip, The Mule was limping a bit. More specifically, the rear wheel was exhibiting some lateral movement or to be more technical, wobble. This was emanating from the hub. Furthermore, the derailleur, after a thorough clean, was also found to be somewhat wobbly at the top pivot. In both of these cases, replacement was called for. Repair wasn't really an option.

The chain was quite worn from all those miles and the cassette, too.

So, it was decided to buy The Mule some nice new wheels, and replace the cassette, chain and derailleur.

There's a plan to go somewhere quite remote and tough for next year's trip and this has been mysteriously alluded to in this blog a few times. Slightly less mysteriously, the plan is to go to Central Asia. The chosen route will be paved in part and unpaved and very rough in others. A risk assessment has been carried out for this trip and amongst the bike-related risks identified, a failure of either wheel was highlighted as "probably a showstopper"! There's no repairing a damaged rim. A spoke? Yes. But if the rim goes you've had it. Ditto hubs unless you carry the spares and tools required. And obtaining spares would be nigh on impossible in the more remote parts of this route. The kindness of strangers and hitchhiking would probably be the only way out of such problems.

Prevention is better than cure though, so the plan had always been to treat The Mule to some bomb proof wheels, designed specifically for touring and capable of handling a heavy load. To that end, after some research, M1 decided to order some custom built wheels from a small, custom wheel builder based in Wales. The company is called Ryan Builds Wheels. Hard to believe but the company is owned by a bloke called Ryan and... he builds wheels. My kind of brand. There can be no confusion as to what Ryan Builds Wheels does, right? Correct.

The website makes ordering custom wheels very easy and there are "ready to roll" wheel sets available, too. M1 ordered the following custom wheels:

Hubs:

Bitex BX207 Six Bolt Disk Touring Hubs - Black

Axle Front:

100mm QR

Axle Rear:

135mm QR

Freehub:

Shimano HG 11 Speed (Steel)

Rims:

Ryde Andra 40 25mm internal, super tough

Rim Size:

700c / 29"

Spoke Count:

36/36 (Stronger wheels for bike packing and more powerful riders)

Spokes:

Sapim Strong Silver (bikepacking / more powerful riders)

Nipples:

Silver Brass

There are a few compatibility issues to be wary of when speccing custom wheels. The freehub must be of a type that is compatible with your cassette and support the number of gears/cogs that it has. The Mule has a 10-speed cassette but with a spacer ring, the Shimano HG 11-speed freehub would be OK. Rims must be of the right diameter and they must be of a width that supports the width of tyre that you intend to use. It must be possible to mount the wheels to your forks using whatever mechanism they support, be it quick release (QR) skewers or through bolts.

M1 thought he knew what to order but equally, knew that if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. So, to be safe, a call was placed to Ryan Builds Wheels. And that call was answered by none other than The Man Called Ryan. You'll never guess what he does for a living by the way.

Ryan turned out to be a thoroughly nice guy and he was happy to discuss M1's wheel needs and help ensure that there would be no nasty surprises through ordering the wrong thing.

The hand-built wheels arrived surprisingly quickly, and M1 got on with fitting them as soon as the other parts had arrived. 

In the process, as is his forte, M1 came up with a number of "dumb questions". This is something M1 excels at. But rather than guess or risk it, an email (or two or....) were sent to Ryan to check points of detail with him. Ryan was incredibly patient and clear in his answers. It was nice to be so well supported.

Ryan built these wheels for The Mule

It's worth pointing out that the Bitex hubs use sealed bearings rather than the "cup and cone" type that The Mule's old (and cheap) wheels had. M1 is very pleased with this as there have been many occasions in the past when he's had to disassemble those hubs so as to be able to scrape grass and other crap out from them! The rubber seals those things have are not that effective when it comes to the varied and sometimes challenging terrains and weather conditions that come with bikepacking.

The Ryde Andra rims have a reputation for being the strongest rims out there, capable of supporting very heavy bikepacking loads.

Today, The Mule's Makeover was completed. The utterly lovely new wheels are on. Tyres, tubes and disk rotors have been transferred to the new wheels and they've been locked onto The Mule's forks using new QR skewers:

Rear: Shimano Deore FH-T610 Quick Release Skewer - 135mm

Front: Shimano Deore HB-T610 Quick Release Skewer - 100mm

Other new parts for The Mule that were fitted today are:

• SRAM PG1050 10 Speed MTB Cassette 11-36
• KMC X10 10 Speed Chain Silver 10 Speed 114 Links (but two links removed making it 112)
• Shimano Deore RD-T6000 Trekking SGS 10 Speed SGS

A new front mudguard to replace the one that was abandoned somewhere in France is still to be fitted.

Obtaining Parts

Selecting and obtaining The Mule's new wheels was a joy. It's a shame this was not the case for other parts! It's getting tricky to find 10-speed drivetrain parts and the usual SRAM PG1030 was not to be had for love nor money, necessitating selection of the more expensive PG1050. Worst of all was the derailleur. The Mule uses the Shimano Deore groupset which no longer seems to be available. The Mule's original Shimano SLX Shadow Plus derailleur couldn't be located anywhere and it took some help from M1's local bike shop (LBS) to identify the Shimano Deore RD-T6000 as a suitable alternative. Shimano indicate that only their fancy Linkglide directional chains should be used with this derailleur, by the way. M1 was concerned it might be hard to find this specific chain when in the back of beyond, but the LBS were of the opinion the usual KMC chain should be OK. Time will tell whether or not this is true!

That's It

So, it's a big day for The Mule who will resume standard transportation duties again soon. Fingers crossed everything works as intended. The hex key for adjusting the derailleur limit screws is in The Mule's frame bag, just in case.

Those hand-built wheels from Ryan Builds Wheels look lovely and you can just feel the quality and strength. Again, the proof of the pudding will be in the riding, but right now, M1 is very happy to have bought from Ryan Builds Wheels. M2's bike will need new wheels next year and they'll be ordered from Ryan.

Bikepacking 2025 - Looking back

Our bikepacking 2025 trip is at an end and we're home, recovering (and needing another holiday) and reflecting on our experience. In a nutshell, this year's trip was pretty wonderful with lots of high points and only one or two less than positive elements. We cycled almost 1600 miles and in particular, while crossing France and Switzerland heading east, did quite a lot of climbing!

Countries

In all, we cycled in seven different countries:

1. England
2. France
3. Switzerland
4. Liechtenstein
5. Austria
6. Germany
7. Netherlands

and our final route looked like this:

France, as always, was great. Our outbound journey, heading roughly south-east, mostly followed canals and rivers along dedicated cycle paths. France is hard to beat for a cycling holiday. The Netherlands is also very cycling-friendly, but France has the edge with its world beating, best in class.... bakeries!

In Switzerland, M2 became a fully fledged Alpine cyclist. She'd done a good few big days with more than a thousand metres of climbing in the past, most notably in the Basque country last year. But doing one big, unrelenting climb up a mountain pass in one of Europe's biggest mountain ranges? No, this she had not done. It's fair to say that the idea was a little intimidating to M2 which is exactly how M1 had felt in 2022 when faced with the same climb from the eastern end of Lake Lucerne up to Andermatt. But M2 surpassed her own expectations (but not M1's) and with true grit and determination, completed the four and a half hour climb in style. 

We celebrated our joint achievement at the Andermatt sign but in truth, this was M2's moment.

Cycling to Andermatt was apparently not enough climbing though, so the very next day we did another 10 km climb, all the way up to the top of the Oberalp Pass. This was well worth the considerable effort because the descent down Oberalp Pass was spectacular.

But we both agree that neither of the alpine cycling days were the toughest of all the climbs we did. The Schafmatt Pass in the Jura Mountains wins that prize. The climb itself was "only" 4.5 km but it was steep, clocking in at 15% at its steepest but frequently being over 10%.  We celebrated completing this climb, too! I think the general theme of that celebration was "Thank *&^! that's over!".

We'd never been to Liechtenstein before and it being right on our route, which was now based almost entirely on Eurovelo route EV15, we made the most of the opportunity to spend a day in Vaduz and have a wander around the place. In truth it wasn't particularly special but we're glad we got to go there.

Austria is on the list of countries because we did cycle in Austria! But we probably did less than 10 km in Austria, passing through a small corner as we turned west and headed for Lake Constance.

Germany was a mixed bag. The middle Rhine valley was pretty but perhaps not quite as pretty as the photos you see from the region. But there were numerous castles. 

A lot of Germany consisted of somewhat  uninteresting landscapes and unfortunately, especially as we got beyond the middle Rhine valley, was quite industrial. We've never seen so many lorries in one place, either. Luckily the cycling infrastructure is pretty good so we were rarely on roads with those lorries, although it did happen once, a moderately terrifying experience! The very northernmost part of our ride through Germany was much nicer and we liked Koblenz as well.

The Netherlands was a very pleasant surprise. Lovely countryside with more forest than we expected, fabulous wetlands and lots of canals and rivers, often with ferry crossings. And for cycling infrastructure and general bike friendliness, the Netherlands cannot be beaten. It's amazing. Towns are incredibly quiet because journeys undertaken by car are the minority case. People of all ages go everywhere by bike.

And of course there are windmills. Way more than you'd perhaps expect and some of them are still operational.

And that leaves England. England too, is a mixed bag for cyclists but unfortunately a lot of it is plain awful and you often feel unsafe cycling on roads with so many speeding cars driven by apparently angry or distracted drivers. It's such a shame. We've decided that in future we'll do what we did to get home from Harwich and take the train. Cycling to Newhaven on our first day was pretty dreadful. Cycling to and from Portsmouth last year was not great either. And cycling through and past Royal Tonbridge Wells in Kent in 2023 was awful, too! Sorry, England but you are the worst of all the seven countries for cycling.

Cities

We passed through and sometimes stayed in a number of cities this year. Here are the key ones:

1. Lucerne, Switzerland

Lucerne is a truly beautiful city, full of photogenic sights, buildings decorated with art in lovely old squares, wooden bridges across the river, and of course Lake Lucerne itself.

2. Basel, Switzerland

We passed through Basel twice, once on the way to the Alps and again as we cycled west from Lake Constance before turning north and following the Rhine up to France, Germany and the Netherlands. On this occasion we stayed in an apartment and had one of our rest days there. The airbnb host lived upstairs from our apartment and did a great job explaining the city's customs. It's another lovely place but it also has a certain character, with residents taking a cooling dip in the municipal fountains or floating hundreds of metres down the river with their clothes in a dry bag/float, along with dozens of others! Cool place.

3. Koblenz, Germany

Koblenz was our favourite German city. It's a relatively small place with cobbled streets, attractive squares, the meeting of two rivers, and music in the evenings.

We also stayed in Cologne which didn't really have much going for it apart from a large, somewhat mucky cathedral. It had little character, compared with Koblenz, say.

4. Utrecht

We loved Utrecht. It's a wonderful place. The fairly large old town has been really well looked after. We enjoyed walking and even canoeing along its canals. And almost all journeys (when not done by canoe) are by bike in the old town, so it's a very quiet place as well.

5. Rotterdam

Rotterdam was good! It's a "proper city" and much bigger than Utrecht but we still enjoyed wandering around and looking at the cool architecture and street art.

Yet More Stats

This year's route had a particular profile. It was uphill pretty much all the way across France and Switzerland during the first two and a half weeks. After that, the general trend was downhill all the way to the coast of the Netherlands. Not that it actually was all downhill. Oh no, we almost fell for that one ourselves. Nature doesn't do straight lines, you see. But certainly there was considerably less climbing done once we'd descended the Oberalp Pass in Switzerland and even less once we'd turned North at Basel.

Not surprisingly, it was in the Alps we had our biggest daily ascents and the toughest sequences of days. 

Our longest ride was 73 miles but we had several up in the seventies. No mean feat given how hot it often was.

Statistical Highlights (mile and feet)

Distance and Ascent Daily Stats (miles, feet)

Technology

As always, technology played a part in this trip, some of it new. 

1. Wearables

M1 has a new Suunto 9 Peak Pro watch which he has a kind of love/hate relationship with. The watch is fine although most of its features will probably never be used. Charging it can be a nightmare though. It's a very temperamental system.

M2 has a Fitbit. It likes to comment on her activities in what it presumably believes to be a helpful way. On this trip though, it was freaking out and imploring her to slow down, take it easy and warning her that she might be over-doing it! Silly Fitbit. It may know M1's weight and age but it certainly does not know her. M2 is not not typical and yes, she can do Alpine climbs Mr/Mrs Fitbit. So there!

2. Battery Power

A couple of 20,000 mAh Belkin power banks were used on this trip. They have a few foibles. You can't leave something plugged in and charging from the power bank overnight. If you do, the power bank can start to drain even after the device being charged is full. You can work around this by charging devices to full in the evening and then unplugging them.

But every now and again (it happened three times on this trip), the Belkin will lose a considerable amount of charge (50% one time), for no apparent reason. What triggers this is not understood and it's a bit of a liability.

3. Solar Energy

The star of the technology show though was M1's Alpkit solar panel. 

It supplied energy to his Belkin power bank every day and not once did the Belkin get charged from domestic electricity. M1 charged his phone from the Belkin every day and as such, his phone was powered by solar energy for the whole 44 days of the trip which is quite amazing. We did have good weather but we had a few days when the panel could not be used (pouring rain) and a few when it was heavily overcast or where we spent a lot of the day cycling in the shadow of trees or hills. On the very last day though, the Belkin dumped 50% of its charge and that nearly scuppered the whole solar energy experiment! Luckily, it was the final day and M1's phone was charged enough to get us home.

4. Blogging

Almost all blogging this year was done entirely from M1's smartphone. This was so that for future trips, it will not be necessary to carry a laptop. It went badly initially, relying on a mobile blogging app which has the advantage of letting you prepare your post offline with no internet connection, syncing later. But the app was poor and unreliable. In the end, blogging whenever we had internet connectivity just using the web browser and other tools (some developed by M1), worked fine. It just means that for those occasions where the internet is not available, blog content has to be prepared offline in a text file or Word document or something. The key thing is, it can be done.

The Bikes

Both bikes did well on the whole and miraculously, we got zero punctures. But this is typical and so shouldn't really be surprising. And yet it is. All those miles/km over asphalt, gravel and stones, in the countryside, in cities (with their usual patches of broken glass), by major roads, with trucks dropping bits and pieces and so on. Miraculous. The explanation is simply that on the one hand, we watch out for puncture hazards as we cycle and warn each other if we see something ("glass!!"). The best way to avoid getting punctures is to avoid the things that cause punctures, right? On the other hand, there are some excellent tyres around these days. We use 42 mm Continental Contact Plus tyres and they haven't let us down yet.

A bit of luck helps as well. 

M2's left side crank completely fell of as we cycled into Selestat in France. 

We were lucky it fell off where it did, with us a short walk from our campsite and in a town with an excellent bike repair shop. It was unlucky the crank lost its retaining screw (unheard of in fact) but the incident could have been so much worse. M1's immediate thought was "is this my fault?", of course, as he services the bikes. But on examining his bike maintenance journal, it turned out that the only time that crank has ever been removed was over two years ago before our 2023 trip when our local bike shop changed M2's chainrings so she had lower gears. Checking cranks is now part of the annual service routine!

And The Mule. Faithful old yellow Mule :-) It did the job once again. 

The Mule is a £700 mountain bike, which in bike circles is "cheap as chips" and it does a great, no frills job. That said, luck once again played a part. There was some noise from the drive train that became noticeable a couple of weeks ago. M1 put it down to chain wear. But in fact the freewheel hub in the back wheel has become somewhat wobbly and no attempts to resolve this have succeeded. It's time The Mule had new wheels. Its current wheels are cheap, brandless and were supplied by our local shop after cracks were found in the original wheels supplied by Specialized. They've done very well, having featured in four European bikepacking trips now, and that's 7500 miles or thereabouts, heavily loaded. So, no complaints here and we're just happy it didn't fall apart completely during our trip!

Wildlife 

We always enjoy spotting wildlife as we cycle. Birds are particular favourites. We didn't see anything like the number of different species that we saw last year, but it was still pretty special. 

We saw lots of Grey Herons, often quite close up. But we were most thrilled to see a Purple Heron, a species we hadn't known existed until this trip.

Purple Heron

However, the winner of the coveted Bird of Bikepacking 2025 goes to [drum roll].... The White Stork!

We saw dozens and dozens of these special birds, often grazing in fields rather than perched high in amazing nests atop church steeples and telegraph poles like those we've seen on other trips. We even saw a remarkably confident stork wandering around one of the campsites gently pestering people for food! 

That's it. What an awesome trip. 

Plans are already afoot for an even more amazing trip in 2026. Watch this space!

Bikepacking 2025 - Harwich to Banstead

 

Stats

Today's Route

1. To Harwich station:

2. From Liverpool Street station to London Bridge station 

Forgot to start GPS watch recording!

3. From Sutton station to home:

The Complete Route

Travelogue 

We woke up this morning to torrential rain. At least we weren't in a tent!

There'd been thunder and lightning in the night, so the rain wasn't exactly a surprise. What a welcome back to England!

We'd decided long ago that we'd use the train as much as possible to get home from Harwich and the weather just reinforced our sense that this was the right thing to do. The original thinking had been along the lines that cycling everywhere on the continent is pretty good (aside from Worms in Germany, that is!), and based on our experiences cycling to and from Portsmouth last year and down to Newhaven this year, cycling in England often sucks and occasionally feels downright dangerous. So, with two trains and a little cycling, we made our way home from Harwich.

We left our airbnb place at about 6:30 and cycled 5 km back to the port we'd arrived at yesterday. Right next door to it there's a railway station. And fortunately, it has working lifts so M1 didn't have to carry the bikes up stairs to get to the platform.

There's only room for six bikes in total on these trains and there were a few other cyclists already on the platform. It seemed though that none of them had googled the night before on how to know which carriage you could load your bike onto, like M1 and M2 had because we were the only people to recognise the one and only carriage for bikes as the train arrived and were the first on. There'd have been room anyway, but it's good to feel nice and smug about something every once in a while :-)

This first train took about 90 minutes to get us to London's Liverpool Street station. Once there, breakfast was the first priority. We'd had nothing but a few sips of water from our bottles since getting up at 6:00. So, we hit the Gails bakery at the station and had three croissants total and a coffee each. It was just like old times.

It was raining even harder than at Harwich now but we had no choice but to start cycling. London Bridge station is only a couple of km away, just to the south of the River Thames, so it wasn't too bad and our waterproofs did an OK job.

At London Bridge, we were fortunate to see that a train to our local station, Sutton was due to leave in only about 10 minutes. Great timing. M1 used his debit card at the barriers and gained access to the platform. M2 followed, tapped her card and..... DISASTER! She discovered that her card had expired a couple of weeks ago! M1 was on the platform. M2 was on the other side of the barriers. M1 was not able to use his card to pay for M2 as well.... the system does not allow this. The clock was ticking! The theme tune to Mission Impossible started to play somewhere. M2 turned her bike around and sprinted.... weirdly it looked like she was moving in slow motion and somehow this indicated she was moving really fast.... over to the ticket machines on the far side of the station. She worked her way through the labyrinth of on-screen choices and managed to buy a paper ticket! M1 signalled from afar that we had only three minutes left to get that train!

We made it. Phew! The Mission Impossible music stopped playing and may in fact have been imaginary all along. We're not sure as we both heard it. But mass hallucinations aside, our mission was accomplished and we were on the train to Sutton with our bikes and our bags.

At Sutton we were thrilled to discover that the lifts were out of service. M1 carried The Mule, bags still attached, all the way up the steps to the barrier. A kind employee carried M2's bike (despite us repeatedly asking him not to as we genuinely fear someone grabbing the wrong part of the bike and something breaking with all the weight). No disaster. We got the bikes up to street level.

From Sutton, it was a 5 km ride all the way home.

The washing machine is running full steam. The tent and camping gear will be cleaned and aired when we next have suitable weather. M2 has had her first cup of tea in six weeks. 

We're home.

Photos 

Leaving Harwich in the rain

The Shard at London Bridge, head in the clouds

On our final train home

Bikepacking 2025 - Returning to the UK

 

Stats

Today's Route

In the Netherlands:

In the UK:

Route So Far

Travelogue 

We left our campsite and cycled along route EV12 (The North Sea Route) a whole 4 km to the ferry port at Hook of Holland. Having checked we could find the place and with over three hours to kill, we relocated to the nearby centre of the town, bought some food for the seven hour crossing, found a bench to sit on and.... Waited. 

People watching passed the time. There really wasn't much else to do.

Eventually it was time to check in for our ferry. We cycled back to the port, passed immediately through passport control and straight onto the ferry. The two bikes are lashed to metal bars which will hopefully ensure they don't move around during the voyage. M1 and M2 found seats not far from the coffee bar and have settled in with books and music to pass the time.

Unfortunately,  our seats were not quite far enough from the children's play area and so it was not the most peaceful of crossings, but we made it.

We arrived in Harwich at about 20:15, disembarked and cycled a mere 5 km to the Airbnb property we're staying in tonight.

That's it for today!

Photos