Only 6 more days until I start riding

Today I spent most of the day getting my bike and gear ready.  A few weeks ago I installed a set of trekking/butterfly handlebars and have been making adjustments every week since then.  This morning I cut a couple inches off the end of the bars to give my legs additional clearance when standing, swapped out both derailleur cables for some longer ones so that I could relocate my shifters, made some final modifications to my handlebar bag to lower it so that it is no longer half blocking my headlight and finally re-installed the handlebar tape.

The middle half of today was spent sorting all my gear, weeding out some things I think I can live without and packing it all into the panniers and/or onto the racks.  A couple of trips to the store were also necessary to grab some last minute items.  The picture below shows the mess I started with.

I only ran into two minor snafus.  After discovering the sleeping bag I had bought was just too damn big I decided to borrow on of my son's sleeping bags.  The other minor issue came when I tried to figure out how to mount a reflective safety triangle that I was planning to attach to the back of the load on my rear rack.  While drilling a hole in it to create a mounting location I broke off a significant piece of it.  The solution was simply to do without it.  On the plus side, I ended up with a much better place to mount my tail light after the changes.

A full list of the items I packed is available on the "Equipment" page.

The set-up I will be spending the next 10 weeks on is shown below.  After getting everything loaded I weighed the bike plus gear at 85 lbs (ouch).  It is about 10 lbs more than I was expecting but I imagine I will lose that much off my body in the first few weeks.