Simplifying Is Complicated: Life in Two Saddlebags
There’s this beautiful fantasy that once you strip your life down to its essentials, you reach nirvana. That if you just get rid of the clutter, sell your stuff, leave the house, pack light, and hit the road you’ll be free. Light as air. Drifting blissfully from one beautiful scene to the next with a warm breeze at your back and nothing but a spork in your pocket and wisdom in your eyes.
Well. Sort of.
Tay and I did the thing. We packed down our lives into 48-liter saddlebags each: one for camping, one for personal gear. “Personal,” by the way, is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It includes clothes, toiletries, headlamps, journals, toolkits, vitamins, backup headsets, a random reusable shopping bag that always ends up full of breadcrumbs and on one memorable occasion, a large amount of spilled soy sauce.
Our home is a tent. Our kitchen rides on the back of Tay’s XT250. Our power grid is a nerdy black briefcase we affectionately call BABS, (short for Big-Ass Battery System and when she’s being annoying she’s treated to her given name of Barbara) strapped to the KTM like some kind of electric possum. The idea was to simplify. Get back to basics. Travel light. Unburden.
But here’s the thing nobody puts on the Instagram captions: simplifying your life is kind of a pain in the ass.
You learn quickly that every gain comes with a cost. Take our cook setup. We have a titanium burner, titanium pot, titanium cup. It all fits like nesting dolls inside a three-liter stuff sack. Beautiful. Minimal. Brilliant. But titanium, it turns out, is like the overachiever of the periodic table - especially when it comes to bonding with burned eggs. Scrubbing off stuck food requires effort, and effort means tools, and tools take space. Which means you’re now carrying a specialized scouring pad, a dropper bottle of Dr. Bronner’s, and an unreasonable amount of righteous indignation.
Or consider clothes. My wardrobe consists of three shirts, three pairs of underwear, three pairs of socks, a pair of joggers, and one pair of jeans, all made of Merino Wool because I pity the fool who travels with cotton. Tay, who is generally a walking confetti cannon of color and charm, initially tried to bring expressive pieces. But reality smudged all of that away. My bright white t-shirts don’t survive a week in these conditions. Patterns fade. Dirt doesn’t. Eventually, we both defaulted to monochrome. Everything’s black or dark gray now - because it hides the road grime and chain oil and mystery stains from that one night we camped next to a muddy flax seed field with mud the consistency of room temperature butter (don’t ask).
Tay misses wearing jewelry. I miss feeling like I have a “style.” Sometimes, I catch myself nostalgically remembering a favorite hoodie - left behind in Tennessee, probably being worn by a family of moths by now. But the tradeoff? We’re out here. Living. Moving. Drinking instant coffee on the edge of a dutch dike like we’re in a budget Eurovision special REI catalog.
Now let’s talk about BABS.
BABS is a mildly absurd project. Inside her rugged shell is a 58V, 20Ah lithium battery with a battery management system, which steps down via buck converter to 24V and then through a Coolgear USB-C power supply that spits out 320 watts. She’s the reason we can work, navigate, write, call home, and binge download Plex and Netflix at 2 AM in the middle of a Belgian swamp. She’s a box of electricity and possibility. She’s our power grid and our datacenter - because she also carries our Starlink Mini, lovingly plopped on the ground and vaguely aimed at low Earth orbit.
The Starlink subscription isn’t cheap. But it is priceless. Tay has work calls three days a week, and with BABS and a patch of grass, we can show up to those calls like we haven’t been living out of saddlebags and eating couscous for dinner four nights in a row. (Pro tip: the camera only shows from the shoulders up. Below the table is just thermal leggings and a half-inflated sleeping mat.)
All this “freedom” we’ve chased? It does exist—but it’s tethered to a thousand tiny tasks.
Every day we pack and unpack. We clean gear. We make repairs. We cook eggs. We wipe down dishes. We repack our panniers in a specific sequence because if Tay’s cutting board isn’t under the spork bag, everything shifts and something explodes.
We don’t have more stuff. But we spend more time managing it. Organization becomes religion. Weight becomes obsession. Volume becomes game. Everything has its place. Every corner counts. You find yourself making little phone notes to track how often you use your third pair of socks. (“Every 4.3 days,” by the way. I timed it.)
And sometimes, when we’re crouched over the bikes in a gravel lot, re-rolling our sleeping mats for the third time because one of them won’t fit, we look at each other and just laugh. Because this is the cost of the freedom we asked for. We traded a couch and a Netflix subscription for a French countryside and satellite internet. We gave up closets and junk drawers and plug-in air purifiers for the sound of crickets and a sky full of stars.
Everything in life is a tradeoff.
The trick is realizing which costs you’re willing to pay.
Some people trade their time for comfort. Some trade comfort for movement. Some trade security for adventure. You can’t have it all. But you can pick what you want most—and deal with the friction that comes with it.
Our friction is sand in the tent, chain lube in the toothpaste bag, a USB-C cable that’s always three inches too short, and endless cycles of packing cubes that never quite zip the first try. But our reward is a life that moves. That stretches. That shows us the quiet edges of countries and the kindness of strangers.
We didn’t simplify to escape busywork - we just traded one kind for another. And honestly? We like this kind better.
So here we are. Two people. Four saddlebags. One Wi-Fi spaceship possum strapped to a dirt bike. Still figuring it out. Still adjusting the balance.
Still living the paradox:
Freedom takes work.
Simplicity takes effort.
And somehow, that makes it even more beautiful.