Nobody photographs the end of a touring day. The tent is up, and supper is finished. The light is going. And before I let myself sleep, I go over the bike.
It isn’t much of a ceremony. I spin each wheel and watch it run. I squeeze both brakes. I pull a rag down the chain, thumb the tires, and put a finger on every rack bolt in turn, because rack bolts are liars and I stopped trusting them past lunch about a decade ago.
Two minutes, maybe three. I’ve done it by headlamp in a sheep pasture in Normandy and behind a fire hall in Tatamagouche. I’ve done it in rain heavy enough that checking anything made no sense, since whatever was loose would still be loose at dawn.
I did it anyway. That is more or less the point.
The Respectable Answer
For years, when anyone asked, I called this preventative maintenance. It’s the respectable answer, the one that sounds like a touring manual, and it isn’t false. Bolts back out. Chains stretch. A brake pad wears in silence for a thousand kilometres and then announces itself on the one descent where you needed all of it.
But preventative maintenance doesn’t explain why I feel wrong on the rare nights I skip the check. Not worried about the bike. Wrong, the way you feel when you’ve gone to bed angry. The truer answer is that the nightly check is the closest thing a bike tourer who doesn’t normally pray in the literal sense to saying your nightly prayers. A small fixed act, performed in the same order, at the same hour, regardless of mood. Performed especially when the mood is against it.
That’s the whole definition of a practice, as far as I can tell: a thing you keep doing while the feelings come and go, and which is quietly reshaping you the entire time you think nothing is happening.
The chain does not care how your day went. You can’t perform for a derailleur, and there’s no audience out in the dark behind the fire hall anyway. Just you, a rag, and the actual condition of things.
You Kneel
A loaded touring bike will eventually put you on your knees. Mine did it on the shoulder of Route 2 west of Parrsboro, where a drive-side spoke let go, and the rear wheel went from a circle to an opinion. So there I was: panniers off, everything I owned spread across a garbage bag on the gravel, cars pulling wide around a man kneeling beside an upturned bicycle as though he’d stopped to bury something.
You cannot fix a bicycle from a position of dignity. You kneel on the shoulder, or you don’t ride on.
Almost everything else in my life will accept a good story in place of the truth. Customers can be reassured. Deadlines can be renegotiated. Even my own body lets me pretend for weeks at a time. The bike won’t. A stretched chain measures stretched no matter how I frame it. The spoke was broken, the wheel was out of true, and my knowledge was either in my hands or it wasn’t. No amount of confidence would stand in for a spoke key.
A few summers ago in Portugal, somewhere in the hilly area south of Castro-Verde, the bike developed a click. Once per pedal stroke, load-dependent, the kind of sound that has a dozen possible fathers. The correct response is to stop, isolate, and listen: swap feet, change gears, stand, sit, let the bike tell you where it hurts. What I actually did was turn up my music for three days.
It was the left pedal. Thirty seconds of honest listening would have found it. I had been managing the sound instead of hearing it. It’s exactly how I handle certain other clicks in my life, and I doubt I’m the only one.
Glued Shut
My phone is glued shut on purpose. Opening it voids the warranty and requires a heat gun. My truck monitors its own oil and tells me about it with an amber icon, which is less an invitation than a summons: make an appointment, sit in the waiting room, drink the coffee, pay. Somewhere between my grandfather’s generation and mine, care got converted into a service you purchase. We may be the first people in history raised to believe that looking after our own things is someone else’s job.
The touring bicycle is one of the last machines that refuses the arrangement. Nearly every part of it can be serviced at the edge of a road by one person with cold hands. It ships with that expectation built in. It assumes a relationship, and it holds you to it. I suspect that’s why we love these heavy, awkward contraptions the way we do. A thing you cannot care for is a thing you cannot love. You can only use it up and replace it.
Meanwhile the machine holds up its end of a lopsided deal. Water, shelter, food, tools, spare warmth, and a human being, all of it rolling on two patches of rubber the size of your thumbprint, ten hours a day, for weeks. Ninety seconds with a rag every evening is not devotion. It’s barely even rent.
Still, those ninety seconds have done more to me than to the chain. Wipe, check, tighten, listen. I write in another place about stillness and attention, and readers sometimes ask where a person ought to start, expecting something about breathing. I keep giving the same unsatisfying answer. Get a rag.
Because the habit leaks. Check one machine every night for six weeks, and you come home a person who checks things. The tent seams get seam-sealed before the trip instead of during it. The woodpile gets restacked. You catch yourself listening to the furnace the way you listened to the drivetrain and, more slowly, to the people at your table.
Not from worry. From care. There’s a difference, and the side of a road is where I learned it.
The Slow Wash
I don’t want to oversell the sacredness; it can be a bit of a stretch at times. Plenty of nights the check is pure drudgery, three resentful minutes between me and my sleeping bag, and I find nothing, and it feels like nothing. That’s fine. A practice that only counted when it felt profound wouldn’t survive the end of a wet day on the road.
But some nights you’re kneeling by the back wheel with a headlamp, the chain running clean through the rag, and the whole day is suddenly there in your hands: the climb, the headwind, the gas-station coffee, the eighty kilometres this small machine just carried you without complaint. It’s the only version of gratitude I trust, the kind with grease on it.
The full pre-tour version of the ritual, the shakedown that finds these problems while you’re still within walking distance of your own garage, has a chapter of its own in my book Train, Pack & Ride, and I’d rather you learn it there than on Route 2.
The grease itself works into the creases of your knuckles over a long tour and won’t scrub out, no matter what is put by the sink. It fades on its own, about a week after you get home.
I’ve stopped hurrying it.
This piece first appeared on the Cycle Touring Life Substack, where a new letter from the road goes out every week. Subscribe here.
Gear that goes with this story: the multitools and repair kits that live in our frame bags, and the Crankbrothers M19 that has ended more roadside arguments with derailleurs than we can count.