Improvisation, charging things and Deutch underpants

Older readers might have seen cartoons by a cartoonist called Heath-Robinson, who drew pictures of improbable devices made up of everyday items usually cobbled together with pieces of knotted string.
Part of the attraction of having to be minimalistic bike touring is improvising and I’m rather proud of the following items.

1) Coffee maker. 

Following the great #nodecentinstantcoffeeinsupermarkets scandal, I bought this little device (it’s a french tea maker - basically two halves of a tea strainer) and adapted it by filing down the edges with any bit of concrete I could find.(Note - another thing to amuse the natives). It now fits very neatly into the Starbucks (other coffee places are available) vacuum flask. Slowly pour boiling water into the coffee, and voila - a great cup of coffee, with the added bonus of the vacuum flask keeping your coffee hot. Total cost - some 4 Euros or so

More first world problems solved.

2) Solar charge holder

We have a couple of portapow solar chargers. If figures mean anything to you, one is 15W and the other is 11W, and they will happily charge up our garmins and helmet walkie talkies. We also have a two 10000mAh batteries, so the solar chargers keep this topped up as well. A bobbin of what one might call knicker elastic and some hooks from a supermarche means that the solar charger can be working whilst I cycle as well.
Charging time- batteries charging helmet walkie talkies. Rather colourful in the tent.

This is the multifunctional clothes dryer, solar generator and water carrier. It can also be used to cycle places if you want.

Probably the biggest power drain is my MacBook that faithfully follows me around. The big solar charger will charge it up, but of course you do rather rely on the sun for this. Otherwise it's plug it in whenever you get the chance. (campsite shaver sockets are rather good for this- I'm happier to leave a battery charging there rather than anything valuable)

3) Chain cleaning.

Around the UK, look hard enough and you will usually come across some discarded item of clothing like a T shirt that you can use to clean mucky chains. Not so in Germany - they are far tidier or at least fonder of their clothing than we are. So after a while I gave up looking for them, and turned to another source - namely Aldi. There are as many Aldi's here as there are branches of Starbucks in the UK, and often ( curiously, from the point of view of competition), Lidl and two other similar stores, Netto and Penny. Aldi had a bit of a special offer on underpants, and I worked out this would give the best bang for buck yield of cleaning material. So some major surgery later, which would make Jean Paul Gautier very proud, I got a good few squares of material. The remains sadly were somewhat too revealing to have any further use......
Very natty.



4) Plain old scrimping. 

No cycle tourer ever worth his or her salt should fail to have in their back pocket a few paper towels purloined from wherever they see them. Ideal for washing hands and cleaning stuff. Small portions of butter from cafe's can be used for cooking.




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