+++ Rides 2022 +++ Add yours here +++

[Andre Jute]

Dramatic photo — and I too was just about to ask where you got the blue discs…

Is that sunwhitened guano on the Bass Rock and the other hill, or snow that hasn’t got the memo that Summer starts on 1 April, not coincidentally April Fool’s Day?

[navrig]

Dramatic photo — and I too was just about to ask where you got the blue discs…

Is that sunwhitened guano on the Bass Rock and the other hill, or snow that hasn’t got the memo that Summer starts on 1 April, not coincidentally April Fool’s Day?

The white is probably more grey and comes from, mostly, birds (gannets) rather than guano.

More info here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_Rock#Fauna_and_flora

[PH]

I'm selling the Eclipse and my Raven to part-finance a lovely new  gunmetal Mercury Mk 3.  This is nearly assembled, & shd be ready to go in the first week of May. Hope to do my first rides in the Gatineau hills across the river shortly, notes & photos to follow.

Big changes!  Hope the new bike is everything you want.  Look forward to your impressions when the time comes.

[Andre Jute]

Thanks, Navrig. The island certainly has a dramatic history. I didn’t know guano isn’t a generic name for all bird dung clinging to a rock.

***
John, I hope you’ve arranged with the new owners that you’ll be keeping your broken-in saddles…   — (signed) JOHN BROKEBACK BROOKS esq

[Andre Jute]

Apologies for not having a more dramatic photograph but, since for the first time in near enough two and a half years I've been out on my bike several days in a row, I've been inspecting favorite lanes to discover whether they still deserve to be favorites or have degenerated during the Chinese Pandemic. To my pleasant surprise, the County Council has used the nearly traffic-free time to restore some of the lanes to at least a level state. This particular lane has only two houses on it, and hadn't been resurfaced in the twenty-odd years I've been using it to avoid riding on a lethal road (black spots every few hundred yards), except for irregular pothole filling which was often a cure worse than the disease. But now they've run the chip and seal machine over it, and it's level and when the loose chips are gone will be pleasant to cycle on.

[Danneaux]

My! You surely live -- and ride -- in a marvelously scenic area, Andre!

Best, Dan.

[Andre Jute]

After two glorious weeks of August in the mid-20Cs here in beautiful West Cork, today we had the logical conclusion of a powerful, low-flying thunderstorm. The tall tree on the left of the photo is the eucalyptus outside my study window, the last greenery you can see downhill towards the town is less than a hundred yards away, the normal horizon of a ridge of hills on the far side of the Bandon River is invisible as is the substantial river in the valley. In visibility this poor, despite the fact that I ride mainly on very small lanes where the residents drive with consideration for each others' children (and incidentally me, though some of them think I live on their lanes), I stay off the road because it takes only one bolshie lawyer to drive his SUV faster on the larger connecting roads than the mist will allow, and goodbye cyclist. My bikes are too young to be Ghost Bikes.

[Danneaux]

...today we had the logical conclusion of a powerful, low-flying thunderstorm.

You sure did, Andre! Wonderful photo.

I was riding my Nomad well into the evening last week after a long day ride when the air "turned" and I sensed something Big was coming, so I headed home 'fast as I could. I'd just gotten in the garage when the skies opened up with lightning and -- unusual for us -- golf ball-sized hail just before 22:00. I was very grateful to have just missed it on my bike, especially as it was dark and the last of the ride lacked tree cover.

The car is temporarily in the drive while my new solid bamboo flooring is in the garage until I get on the stick and install it. Concerned about hail that sounded like falling hammers on the garage roof, I dashed out in it to cover the car with old moving blankets, hoping to prevent hailstone damage. It worked, as the next morning saw no damage at all, though the moving blankets were torn in several places by the 'stones. My neighbor's Subaru was not so lucky; it has dimples on all the horizontal surfaces.

Here's hoping your thunderstorm had only light and sound, not the "gift" of large hailstones as well.

All the best, Dan.

*Note: First photo of the hailstone is not mine; it was posted without attribution to my neighborhood's Facebook page.

[Andre Jute]

Ouch! Shiver-making photographs, Dan.

We get several hailstorms every year and occasionally get caught in them on our bikes. But the stones are small diamonds, not that enough of them hitting your face in the same place can't bruise, and even the small ones can cut, just like diamonds. We've never failed to find shelter, though. There are always trees near where we ride. The carpet of small stones, which can take a while to melt in the winter, when we're not inclined to lollop under trees waiting for them to melt and then run the risk that they form ice on the road, can be more of a menace as it is difficult for two-wheelers to find footing in them.

[JohnR]

I went to Bangladesh at the start of 1984 for some work and wondered why the project car had dents and a plastic sheet instead of a back window. I initially assumed that it had been caught in a brick-throwing riot and then learnt that it had been in the wrong place at the wrong time when some large hailstones fell out of the sky. Google reveals that some of the Bangladesh hailstones can be deadly - not something I would want to encounter on a bike! Even pea-sized hailstones can make a lot of noise and be unpleasant although not damaging.

[Andre Jute]

...some of the Bangladesh hailstones can be deadly - not something I would want to encounter on a bike!

Where I grew up, in the Little Karoo desert in South Africa, there was a thunderstorm every afternoon in the summer. The stones were generally the least of your worries, thumbnail size. You soon learned not to seek out the lone tree on a plain for shelter, because it would act as a mast for lightning. The better idea was to find a foxhole and scurry down it because otherwise you'd be the tallest thing on the land. There were succulents too, of which the aloe called Turksvei would grow to taller than a man, but somehow they never attracted the lightning when you needed them to, and they weren't dense enough to hide under and anyway were covered in dangerously large thorns.

But even with a foam helmet, i wouldn't want to be out in hail with the stones of the size Dan is showing. That's concussionville, or worse.

[John Saxby]

First blush of autumn in the Gatineau hills -

No fierce weather here in recent days, but today I went for a couple of hours' ride across the river and into the Gatineau hills, and a bright mid-August morning rewarded me with a couple of early signs of autumn.

Photo #1 below shows a splash on goldenrod on one side of the road, and #2, the first red blush of sumac.

There'll be more to come in the next 6-8 weeks, but I won't be able to ride up & into the foliage.  In a few days' time, I'll have hip-replacement surgery on my right hip.  My physio does say, however, that if all goes well, I should be able to make a celebratory ride before the snow flies 🤞

[John Saxby]

Headwinds, Horseflies and Loose Gravel:
Notes on cycle-camping with Freddie the Mercury

By way of introduction--

At the end of June, I made a long-awaited overnight cycle-camping trip with Freddie, my new Mercury.  This was an opportunity to ride the new bike with a light camping load, and to test a new tent at the same time.  I chose a familiar route in the neighbourhood: The outward leg headed south and slightly west of Ottawa to and along the Rideau Waterway (rivers, lakes, canals and locks) to the village of Merrickville, and thence to a campsite at Kilmarnock Lock, which I had visited in late August 2021.  The return leg completed a loop, taking me northwards and then northeast away from the water, returning home via a rail trail to the Ottawa River bikepath network. 

On this ride, I added some wrinkles:  Outbound, I followed tarmac roads south to the city limits, headed west through farmland, and as I rode southwest towards Merrickville, turned onto gravel roads before returning to tarmac for the final riverside stretch to my campsite.  Returning, I rode north on tarmac, and then northeast on gravel, followed by a short stretch of tarmac until I reached the rail trail which took me to the Ottawa River bikepath and thence to home.  My total distance was about 165 kms, of which about a third was gravel and rail trail.

Here’s the route on Googlemaps: https://tinyurl.com/z4z87hdt  (The mapped route doesn’t include a wrong turn I made in the back country on the homeward leg, which gave me an extra 6 - 8 kms.)

And those headwinds’n’such: (Notes on gear and setup of the bike follow further below.)

My southern route out of Ottawa takes me along bikepaths and bikes lanes on arterial roads that roughly parallel the Rideau River.  The route runs through and beside portions of Ottawa’s urban forest, now looking bashed-about.  In late May, we were battered by a fierce windstorm, variously described as a horizontal tornado, a downburst, or a “derecho”.  Odd name for a brutal windstorm – “derecho” is “right” or “law” in Spanish.  But whatever its moniker, its path covered about 1,000 kms between Windsor and Québec, and in Ottawa, its gusts reached 190 km/h.  This is enough to take down thick wooden power poles and metal traffic-lights, to rip up tall softwood trees with shallow root systems—conifers and poplars, for example—and to split big hardwoods like maples and ironwoods.  As many as a third of the city’s population, more than 300,000 people, lost power; some friends were without electricity for a week or ten days.  This is our third serious windstorm in five years.  We should expect more of the same, according to sobering commentary from the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.  (And more anecdotally, from our home insurance company as well: checking the provision for wind damage in our own policy, I was told that most of their claims these days are for wind, fire and flood.  Mere B-and-E’s scarcely register.)  The imperative of adaptation seems unavoidable.

A month later, the evidence beside me was stark – huge open slashes in the tree cover, as much as a hundred metres wide and half a kilometre long, tree trunks randomly scattered about, and big piles of sawn logs awaiting collection.  (To the City’s credit, the bike paths were cleared very quickly, so that people could go about their business.  Some major arterial roads were closed for a couple of weeks.)  The path of this storm was long and narrow, however: after I reached the southern outskirts of the city, some 20-plus kms south of the Ottawa River, I saw very little storm damage.

Leaving the city is an unattractive reminder of how Ottawa has sprawled in the last 40-plus years or so: broad bands of suburbs encircle the older core of the city, single-storey shopping malls and low-rise residences connected/divided by multi-lane arterial roads full of large SUVs and even larger pickup trucks.  For a cyclist, c’est pas fun, as they say in Québec, even though some of the arterial roads have bike lanes on each side.  And, the absurdity of building a sprawling city and a transport system based on motor traffic in our geography and climate soon becomes obvious to a cyclist (as it does every spring), even to one who thought he knew the terrain: the road surfaces are scarred with longitudinal and latitudinal frost heaves, cracks and potholes.  They’re fewer and smaller on the newer roads, but it’s only a matter of time, and not much at that.  A couple of years ago, the city declared a climate emergency; despite that, I saw no solar panels on all those low-rise roofs, and the rightly-maligned Ford F150 retains its ranking as Canada’s best-selling vehicle.  Maybe the climate-emergency declaration was just “aspirational”?—but I reckon that’s too kind, that “nugatory” is closer to the mark.

I can manage the potholes and even the traffic – it’s the waves of existential despair that bug me…

But no matter, after just a few kms of decrepit shoulder on a once-charming secondary road beside the river, I turned west onto a rural road nearly empty of traffic, with 20-acre fields of sunlit cropland on either side of me.  I felt better immediately, breathing the country air.  And then, I needed more of it, and still more of it; and, then down onto the drops, yet more of that blessed country air.  The bits of forest, damaged as they are, and even the built-up ‘burbs, unappealing as they are, had shielded me from delightful but very stiff westerlies – a long way from 190 km/h, to be sure, but challenging enough at 60 km/h and more.  I don’t use a speedo, but I reckon I barely made it into double digits – a 5-km stretch with very gentle undulations took me about 30 minutes.  I spent much of that time in 4th & 5th gear.

That soon changed as I angled south-west and onto even quieter rural roads.  Here, forest cover shielded me from the wind, and I rolled along sweetly in 10th and even 11th.  I had chosen a route that would take me onto gravel, and that soon appeared.  Rural gravel roads are common enough in Eastern Ontario and West Québec, and where there are farms along them, the gravel is usually fairly hard-packed and smooth.  We had had some rain two nights earlier, so these roads had no dust or corrugations, and very little loose gravel – the passage of cars and trucks had pushed the loose gravel into three tidy shallow rows, one on each side and one in the middle.  I could have been on tarmac, and rolled along in 9th and 10th listening to birdsong.  I returned to the tarmac a couple of kilometres north of the Rideau at Burritt’s Rapids, and crossed to the pretty south-bank road for the easy run-in to Merrickville.  The 70 kms or so had taken me about 4 hours of riding.

I stopped for a midafternoon meal at the Main Street Restaurant, seeking one of its uncomplicated dishes on its expansive patio.  I treated myself to a chicken parmigiana with salad and iced tea, and leaned Freddie against the nearby rail fence.  Cyclists often attract interest, especially those d’un certain âge.  I was wearing a canary-yellow vest over a close-to-lurid yellow/lime summer cycling jersey, and one of the servers said, “Wow!  Good for you – drivers will see you in that!  I wear the same stuff.”  We chatted about the virtues of conspicuity, and of the imperative of surviving to ride some more.

My meal finished, I was preparing to move on, and a voice said, “Like your bike!”  The voice belonged, I learned, to Franco, who lived in Ottawa and was visiting Merrickville with his wife and father-in-law.  Then, along came Michaela, his wife, sent by her dad to find Franco – he had disappeared, and they were sure he was chatting with someone.  In their forties (I was guessing), they said they were both just getting into cycle-touring, and were curious about Freddie and my cycling and camping gear.  I explained Freddie’s lineage, and we compared notes about Arkel, Revelate and Apidura bags, with a digression into my membership in the Church of Rohloff.

There’s a bond among touring cyclists, and this cheerful 20-minute chat brought back a similar one a couple of weeks earlier.  Returning from a 3-hr out-and-back along the river and into the farmland west of Ottawa, I caught up with a fellow on a fully-loaded touring bike.  I slowed to say hello, and asked where he had come from, and where he was going.  “Just returning from an overnight at Fitzroy,” he said, naming a provincial park 55 kms north of Ottawa on the river. “And, I’m heading home – I live in Kanata.”  He asked if I could show him the route to the bikepath that would take him to the western part of the city, and I was happy to do so.  Rick was his name, and for his 60th birthday he’d treated himself to a Surly Midnight Special with all the trimmings.  And, he was over the moon: “I’ve just done my first tour,” he said.  “My legs are gone, but otherwise I’m OK, and I loved it!”  He is a specialist instrument technician with an Ottawa firm, and is about to scale back to 3 days a week for two years, before retiring.  The Surly was to be his entrée to a new phase of his life.  I applauded his good judgment and said that with more mileage, his legs would be fine.  I told him a little about myself, including buying Freddie as a 75th birthday prezzie to myself.  Said he, graciously, “Well, I figured you for maybe your late ‘60s.  In 15 years’ time I’d love to be doing what you’re doing.”

The last 10 kms to Kilmarnock Lock were straightforward enough, with little traffic on the river road.  But, although the headwinds had eased a bit, I was tired, and my hip muscles were aching.  I was pleased to find a quiet spot amid the cedars in the camping area just downstream from the lock, in virtually the same spot where I’d camped in late August last year.

There were some clouds overhead, and a forecast of possible showers, so I pitched camp quickly; and, showers aside, I was keen to try out my spiffy new Nemo Dragonfly two-person tent in its natural habitat.  I had bought the Nemo more than six months earlier in midwinter, from a local outdoor gear supplier selling end-of season stock.  Photos #1 & #2 below show the Nemo in our back yard, without the flysheet, and under the cedars at Kilmarnock Lock.  The tent is nominally a 2-person design, but those two people would have to be very slender and enjoy being very close to each other:  the Nemo is 48” wide at the head, and 42” wide at the foot.  For me, wide shoulders an’ all, it’s spacious; and, it has 42” of headroom.  There’s space enough for me to do most of my end-of-ride yoga inside if I need to.  (As it happened on this day, the brisk westerlies did what they were intended to – they kept the mozzies at bay until nightfall.)

The Nemo weighs 3 lbs 3 oz – just 3oz more than the one-person Tarptent Moment DW which I’ve used since 2015, in its heaviest configuration.  The Tarptent has served me well, and is very spacious, but its highest point is at the beltline of the tent, not over my head; hence, the positioning and the extra few inches of height which the Nemo offers make ingress and egress much easier.  The vestibules on the Tarptent are quite generous, but those on the Nemo are larger still.  As a bonus, its stuff sack is the best I’ve yet encountered: large enough to accept the inner and fly without curses and grunts from its owner, and snug enough to be tidy on the rear rack, while just fitting under my seat bag.  The only “but” by comparison with the Tarptent is that its inner tent and fly are not conjoined, so require sequential setup.  Nevertheless, setup is quick and easy, and the Nemo is fully free-standing, and the Tarptent is not.  So, it’s a keeper.

Having assured my shelter for the night, I took a swim in the canal, downstream from the lower gates of the lock.  I had the peaceful setting all to myself.  (See photo #3)  The lockstation has a loo for the use of campers and boaters, an addition to the original lockmaster’s house in the photo, but no shower.  As ever, a Canadian lake or river does the necessary at the end of a day’s ride.  Followed as usual by a couple of cups of The Great Rejuvenator, strong black Yorkshire tea with condensed milk.  Who knew that the Yorkshire dales were home to such divine stuff?

Sipping my tea and scribbling my notes as the late-afternoon sun banished the clouds, I heard a scraping and scuffling from the wooden dock just downstream.  A big fellow, thirty-ish, came by carrying his kayaking paddle and a drybag.  He was knackered, having just finished two hours’ paddling from Merrickville, straight into the headwind.  I sympathized, saying it was a good thing he wasn’t paddling a canoe, all the while secretly relieved that I had recovered from the effects of 4 ½ hours’ ride against the wind.  He was heading to Kingston, the southern terminus of the Rideau Canal, a hundred kms away.  A bold soul indeed: for most kayakers, that would be three days’ work, but most paddlers make the journey from the south, so that the prevailing westerlies are at their back.  He was a motorcyclist and a cyclist as well as a paddler, so we chatted about two-wheelers and boats.  He rode a Suzuki rocket, the one-litre GSX four, and said he thinking of selling it – he found it uncomfortable over any distance.  I mentioned that I’d ridden various Suzukis in the ‘60s and ‘70s, including two of the 500cc two-stroke twins, which were the best of the lot.  I might have been speaking of antiques. He nodded, and said, “Yes, I’ve heard tell that those were very good bikes.”

After we wished each other safe journeys and tailwinds, I made an early night of it.  The wind dropped, as it does, and only of few drops of rain came down.  I went to sleep to a symphony of night birds and frogs, with the high whine of a swarm of mozzies outside the tent.

(Next instalment continues below.)

[Andre Jute]

I can manage the potholes and even the traffic – it’s the waves of existential despair that bug me…

I prefer the potholes to the traffic, and in my lanes existentialism hardly exist among the calves and the baby birds and young fox families to be shepherded away from the dog kennels. Actually, I'm too cheerful a fellow to despair, and I got put off by occasionally seeing J-P Sartre when I was a student: he never smiled. He wasn't a cyclist.

Here’s the route on Googlemaps: https://tinyurl.com/z4z87hdt  (The mapped route doesn’t include a wrong turn I made in the back country on the homeward leg, which gave me an extra 6 - 8 kms.)

Dragging the mouse across the map, it causes a window to pop up, which announces that you covered 158km in 8hrs 7mins. Holy Moses, in part against 60kph winds! It sounds like your new Mercury is a very speedy (touring) bike indeed.

Thanks for sharing, John, and I'm looking forward to the other half of your journey.

Good luck with the hip replacement.

[John Saxby]

Headwinds, Horseflies and Loose Gravel:
Notes on cycle-camping with Freddie the Mercury

(2nd & final instalment)

I made a relaxed start to the next day, departing around 9:30 after a breakfast of hot cereal with dried fruit and tea.  Rechecking my route on the Osmand app on my phone, I reckoned I had half an hour or so of secondary tarmac, followed by about an hour-plus of gravel through the public forest of Montague Township before returning to the farmland west of Ottawa.  I had a snack in my handlebar bag—a wrap in foil made the day before, some fruit, and a hardboiled egg.  I reckoned to reach Stittsville, a village on the western edge of metropolitan Ottawa by about 1:00, in good time for lunch at a café.

The early stages of my homeward leg followed the script: a half-hour-plus northwards on good secondary tarmac, a fresh breeze on my left quarter (good for the kayaker, I said to myself.) Then, at Nolan’s Corners (the name an echo of Irish settlement in the 19th century—did Nolan work on building the Canal? I wondered) I turned east on fast hard-packed gravel.  After several kms, I came to Pinery Road, my left turn to the north and east – and the story deviated from the script.  I eased into Pinery and immediately found myself riding on a layer of loose, freshly-graded gravel over a base of hard-pack: “freshly-graded”, as in, maybe done the previous day, as there were no vehicle tracks at all to pack down or disperse the gravel.  “OK, Freddie,” sez I, “you’ll not have encountered this stuff before. We’ll take our time, no quick movements, and at least there’s no traffic.”

Indeed there was no traffic, beyond one guy coming the other way on a fatbike, well-suited to the surface.  Riding on that surface was akin to, I dunno, riding on a layer of irregular marbles.  At least there were no corrugations, and no hills – just a few short upgrades as we moved further away from the river, and happily, no downgrades.  Knowing that there was hardpack beneath the marbles helped, because I knew I could get some traction if Freddie’s 40mm Supremes could nudge through to the base.  Most of the time, they did.  I had backed off the pressure in my tires a little after my first day, to 50 PSI at the front and about 55-56 at the rear—that certainly felt more comfortable, and probably improved the bike’s traction as well.

The map had shown just a handful of homesteads along the road, and as I continued, I realized that Pinery Rd was basically a forest access road.  Accordingly, the Extenuating Circumstances quickly appeared, in the form of clusters of horseflies, maybe a dozen or more at a time.  No worries, sez I to myself, where there are horseflies, dragonflies will follow, Nature will be in harmony, and you can focus on riding through the marbles.  Not.  In my years of canoeing in parc de la Vérendrye, I never fussed about horseflies, ‘cos there were hordes of dragonflies.  Not so in Montague Township Forest:  there be no dragonflies in yonder forest, and the horseflies there fly free to feast upon the backs of the hands of cyclists foolish enough to pass through.

All-of-a-sudden, then, the task of maintaining stability, traction and reasonable forward motion without any sudden movements atop the marbles became more complicated:  how to do all that with just one hand on the handlebar, whilst the other swats at (and occasionally hits) ravenous horseflies atop the hand on the handlebar?  And then, of course, one has to switch hands and repeat.

Well, we made it, and without mishap.  But, it took a good 90 minutes, and c’était pas fun, non, pas du tout.  And I can’t even recommend the scenery:  maybe there really is such a thing as Too Many Spruce Trees.  It’s not so much the conifers themselves, y’see, as the wretched horseflies they shelter.  Perhaps yesterday’s headwinds (converted to today’s tailwinds) might’ve helped, but who knows?  On this day, they had become gentle tailwinds.  And horseflies are macho buggers – they despise weak winds.

Leaving the forestry road and heading for tertiary tarmac and good gravel, my junction was unsigned; looking skyward, I took what I thought was the easterly road that would soon lead to a T-junction that would take me north.  Shoulda double-checked my map, duh: after a couple of kilometres, giddy with speed on hard gravel, I did check my map, and, er, retraced my route for my real turn east and then north.  No harm done, tho’ I felt like a right chump, and I carried on north towards Stittsville.  As I entered farming country again—marginal farming, to be sure—the horseflies duly scattered to the safety of their coniferous lairs.  On a mix of hardpack gravel and tertiary tarmac, I paused roadside for a midday snack untroubled by any buzzing flies.  Passing through the hamlet of Ashton Station, home to the old and locally famous General Store (now closed  ) and the resurgent Ashton Brew Pub, a few more kms brought me to the rail trail that runs eastward into Stittsville, and eventually, into Ottawa’s west end.

The rail trail was quiet, with just a few riders and hikers west of Stittsville.  The surface is reasonably firm and smooth, and the recent rain had laid the dust quite nicely.  As the rail trail met Stittsville’s Main Street, I was tickled to find myself next door to a suitable riposte to the horseflies:  the Ritual on Main café had a big sign advertising fresh ice cream.  A decent cappuccino, a serious butter tart and a hefty double blueberry ice cream made for a good mid-afternoon snack, enough to see me home along the rail trail and the Ottawa River bike path.  The trail is a much better way to return to the city than the southern route—and indeed to leave it, so long as a rider wants to go west.  The arterial roads are still all around, of course, with their torrent of pickups and the like, but delicate souls like me don’t have to look at the wretched things 

Gear and setup of the bike:

This was just an overnight mini-tour, and as I planned to eat a couple of meals in cafés en route, I carried only a light camping load:

•   Tent and groundsheet, sleeping bag and mattress;
•   Clothing (socks, underwear and T-shirt), raingear and rubber camp shoes;
•   Stove, cookware, and food for a cooked breakfast and lunch & snacks on the road;
•   Phone, sunblock, bug veil and dope, and toiletries, some electronics (storage battery &            cables), wallet, keys, sunglasses and backup glasses;
•   Tools, spares, clickstand, pump and lock.

Total weight of these items was about 25 lbs.  The tent went on top of my rear rack, and the rest I packed into my Arkel Dry-lite panniers on the rear, a Revelate Sweetroll (medium) suspended from the front T-bar, and an Axiom handlebar bag. 

The rear rack merits a heads-up footnote:

When I ordered my Mercury frameset, forks and components, I planned to use my spare Tubus Vega rear rack.  In my prep for this trip, I was surprised to see that the Mercury has just one threaded hole above each rear dropout.  These would accept bolts for rear mudguard stays or a rear rack, but not both – at least, not easily or quickly.

Wot to do?  A friend recommended I consider a Tubus Disco rack, which is designed to work with a disc-braked rear wheel, and which mounts via a QR hub skewer.  The Disco is not widely available, but I found one online (at a DISCOunt, no less) and it arrived in time for me to mount it on my Mercury.  Doing so was reasonably straightforward, but – it didn’t quite “just bolt on, sir”:

•   The brake side of the wheel (with the QR lever) required an array of spacers to clear the disc.  Happily, my habit of collecting such things meant that I could create the necessary clearance.  Having done so, and then checking that I could easily remove the QR skewer, I realized that I wouldn’t look forward to removing the wheel roadside on a rainy night; or indeed on a muddy back road in the daytime.
 
•   Then, mounting my Dry-lites--which I had set up for the Tubus Vega rack—onto the Disco, I discovered that the arched “bridge” between the V-shaped vertical struts on each side of the Disco (which would accept the elasticated hook of each pannier) was about 5 cms closer to the “shelf” of the rack than was its Vega counterpart.  That meant that my Dry-lites’ fastening hooks weren’t even close to the tension necessary to hold the plot in place; this, even after maximum adjustment of the straps between the two panniers atop the “shelf” of the rack. Boooo!

And once again, wot to do?  A bodge did the trick — elegant in conception, I have to say, if less so in execution:  I fastened a small P-clamp around the apex of the V on each side of the rack, and the tensioned hook of each Dry-lite nicely fits into the curvature of the “P”.  Et voilà! – functionality restored. [photo #4]
 
•   Of course, there’s followup in the form of a winter project: fit the Vega rack.  A closer preliminary look suggests that the Vega and the fender stay clamp will fit together via a single bolt on each side.  TBD, and – who knows? – next spring, maybe I’ll have a spare Disco rack for those hankering for one.

Performance of the Mercury in light-touring mode:

The bike was smooth and comfortable, as expected, and entirely at home on tarmac and hard-pack gravel.  I’ve done only limited mileage this spring and summer, so I didn’t push myself on this ride.  That said, although I was tired at the end of the first day, I felt much better at the end of nearly six hours’ riding on the second day.

My time on the loose gravel of the forestry road was useful (if not much fun), though, because it showed me the limits of my 650B x 1.6” (40mm) Marathon Supremes.  I think that particular surface would test most bikes and riders, but tires in the 50 – 60 mm range on the Mercury would likely offer more stability, comfort and confidence.  (The rider on the fatbike on Pinery Rd was running tires that looked close to 3.0”.)

All that said, my future touring will almost certainly be on tarmac or good gravel by choice, and in any case, Schwalbe in its inscrutable wisdom makes no wider 650B Supreme than the 1.6” I currently have.  So, the issue of wider tires for loose gravel becomes a cow’s opinion (i.e., a mooed point.)

Racks and bags:

•   Next spring or early summer, I hope, I’ll test the Mercury on a short tour with my preferred setup: Vega rear rack with Arkel Dry-lites, and a lightweight Arkel front rack with lightweight panniers. 
•   The jury is still out on the Revelate Sweetroll (medium) bag.  It weighs only about 12 oz, and easily swallows my rain gear, first aid kit, and so on.  It flops around a bit, though, moving fore and aft, thus putting a bit of pressure on the Rohloff’s shifter cables.  (This wasn’t an issue on the Raven with its slightly different cable routing.
•   On this trip, I didn’t take the Revelate medium frame bag I normally use; instead, I took a large (7 ltr) Axiom handlebar bag, which worked well enough.
•   There are a few possible combinations for frame bags and handlebar bags of different sizes, weights, and dimensions, the choice to be made according to the tour, terrain & weather.

So there we are -- first camping impressions, if a bit delayed...

Comments and questions always welcome, but it may take me a while to reply.