Between 2011 July and 2011 September, my partner and I did a 3 300km bicycle tour of southern France. The below is a review of products that we used during that tour.
Finding loose items in a back pack is a slow process. Unless you get extra lucky, it involves taking the big items out and rummaging around for the item. If it's dark it's better to wait until morning. I say this even though I have a semi-translucent back-pack. If your backpack is opaque, be ready to take everything out.
This problem could be, and often is, solved with internal pockets. These add substantial weight, though, and you still can't take the items out as a unit. My partner bought small, thin Zip-Loc-type bags for a project she was working on. I shamelessly stole four of them, one for my medications, one for bicycle tools, one for toiletries and one for the camera charger and converter. I then got a larger, stronger Zip-Loc bag to carry the small bags.
In the mad rush of moving from our apartment before we left, we had some food left over. We took the perishables with us to eat on the plane. One of the items was bread. I intended to recycle the bag, which had contained Whole Foods Snappy Sourdough, upon landing, but the French government recycling program is honest: don't waste our time -- plastic bags are not recyclable. I ended up using this bag to the end. I used the bag as a 2nd barrier to food containers in case they leaked. It was a stalwart, tough and trustworthy to the end.
The small bags were ultimately prone to tears. In the photo above, the bag with the most duct tape was the tools bag. No surprise there. Once I lost my mini-roll of duct tape, I had no way to repair the bags, so the last 30 or so days were stark examples of entropy. Still, they lived through hundreds of pullings and yankings. For the bag that held medications, I glued prescriptions to the inside in case customs officials arched any eyebrows (none did).
After I failed to fully close my medication bag one fine rainy day, something that essentially ruined the medication, I kept an additional plastic bag that I somehow came across (probably from a boulangerie; the French are great about putting bread into paper, but occasionally...). This kept my medications dry, though it was too late to do any good.
In all, the bags added 24g to my chargement. I'm not one to say "it was worth the extra weight," but it was worth the extra weight.
