touring

The Tortec Expedition rack is a good value option if you want your bike, rather than your back, to take the strain. Strong enough for a big load and and nicely constructed, it'll turn its hand to everything from the commute to a full-on tour.

The Quoc Pham Tourer shoe is a chunky, comfortable touring shoe, for the more narrow-footed among you.

There just aren't enough nice looking, traditional leather cycling shoes on the market in my opinion. Quoc Pham stuck their big toe into the shoe arena a few years ago with their pretty 'fixed' shoe, a very slim shoe designed for toe clips.

The Charlie the Bikemonger Wisecracker spacer bottle opener is a natty piece of machined aluminium that will come in handy when you stop for a bottle of your favourite Belgium import beer.

No more chipped teeth or bent keys trying to lever off a bottle top ghetto style.

This neat device is a 3mm, 1 1/8inch headset spacer (I know, a miss match of imperial and metric units but this is how it is) with a pokey out bit (technical wordage) that can prize open the lid on a bottle (bottle opener).

This Juice Pack Powerstation Pro from Mophie is one of the highest capacity portable batteries on the market, perfect to charge your devices on the go.

It stores 6000 mAh, which is enough to charge most phones several times. My iPhone 4S has a battery capacity of 1420mAh, so it can charge it up to four times.

The Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation Pro is a big battery, about the size of two iPhones back to back, but it will still tuck neatly into a bag or even a jersey pocket.

This Tubus Vega Rack is a very sleek and stylish rack, but tourists and audaxers will probably want to look elsewhere.

Tubus describe this as a "low-profile carrier" for "daily use & weekend trips" which sounds about right to me. It still has a healthy 25kg load limit but the load deck is too narrow to be much use, tapering from 9.9cm down to 8.6cm. It's just not wide enough for rack-packs to perch comfortably, especially those with soft undersides, and there are no obvious hooking points for bungee cords or cargo nets.

The Robens Air Impact Single 3.8 Sleeping Mat is seriously light at the price, and makes the difference between a good night's sleep and, well, no night's sleep.

There are, I know, a lot of hardcore bare-bones tourers among you who will assert that sleeping mats and the like are an unnecessary luxury and dead weight when bike camping. I would disagree. Find a compact, lightweight sleeping mat and it can make all the difference.