Apart from our bikes, some of the most important equipment just arrived. During our last trips we either used my brother's tunnel tent or Vroni's two-person tent she got last year. When thinking about the upcoming 18 months, we got to the conclusion that a two-person tent would not be big enough and we started looking for alternatives. When we got in touch with VAUDE, we were extremely happy about their sponsoring and their Ferret XT 3P would have been an awesome three-person tunnel tent with only 3.5kg of weight (which is pretty awesome!). Unfortunately, we are out of season and VAUDE does not have any of those tents left this year. Our research brought up a number of diferent options and we finally settled for the Wechsel-Tents Outpost 3 Travel Line. Even though with 4.6kg it is a bit heavier, it offers a great set of features the Ferret would not have had. The inner tent can be resized according to your needs, there are two doors, a "sun roof" and (!!) it is orange inside, how cool is that (for everyone who does not know me well, I am pretty hyped about orange stuff).

Additionally we needed new sleeping bags as it can have below 0° in the Australian Outback in Winter and our current sleeping bags are not warm enough for that. Again with VAUDE's option out of stock, I found the awesome Deuter Neosphere -4° which even offers connecting both sleeping bags to one large one which is really awesome, if you know what I mean :-P. Most of the time we will probably not really need such warm sleeping bags but in combination with a thin sleeping bag liner you can just use the sleeping bag as a blanket.

Another cool product I just found out about this year is the Therm-a-rest Trekker Chair. One of the most annoying things on a bike trip is not having a back rest, we really missed it on our last trips. The problem is that all camping chairs with a back rest are rather bulky and heavy but this Therm-a-rest Trekker Chair allows you to transform your sleeping mat into a really comfy chair WITH a back rest - and that at just 250g of weight - NICE! Lastly we got some other miscellaneous things we still needed like two 10l water bags, some mesh sacks to organize gear in our bike bags or more cooking equipment. 

Check out all the images in the gallery below, it is a new extension we are going to use to get all the images into our blog posts easily. Please excuse the crappy quality of the pictures, I was too harsh on compressing and the next ones will not be that small again. ;-)

Cheers and keep cycling,
Vroni & Jonas