Before starting a long bike trip, you need to equip your vehicle with everything that can be useful or that can be difficult to find along the way. In addition to the various equipment needed to make repair your bike and personal belongings, it is helpful to add a first aid kit.
Always have a small kit with patches, gauze, scissors to be prepared in the event of a fall or other minor incidents.
The first aid kit for bicycle touring should not contain many objects, but some are indispensable:
- Patches – scratching yourself, maybe while you’re setting up the air chamber, it’s very common. Having a box of patches of various sizes allows you to solve the problem in a short time. The important thing is that they are of high quality and hypoallergenic.
- Eyewash – when walking you should always wear protective goggles, but often this is not enough. Tiny dirty bodies may however enter the eye and cause tearing or itching. To solve this problem, it is enough to use natural looking eyewash, which is usually sold in disposable packages. The eye drop cleans the eye and dampens the iris.
- Scissors – there are thousands of types of scissors on the market, the one that serves the cyclists is a pair of small scissors, sharp, precise cut, very durable.
- Disinfectant – slipping on the asphalt of a cycle track or on the path of a trail you can get very annoying abrasions. These must first be washed with water (that of the bottle) and then disinfected. There are many different disinfectants on the market, but usually they come in big packagings. To reduce space, it is best to transfer a little liquid into a small travel bottle.
- Gauze – sterile gauze are easily packed and sealed one by one. They can be applied on abrasion to protect it from dirt and dust until the wound is healed. One or two gauze are usually sufficient for the first aid kit.
- Tweezers – sterile tweezers take very little space and are very useful in removing dirty bodies such as stones, gravel, and asphalt from the wound.
Unless you are facing a particularly demanding journey in a country with poor health and hygiene, the above listed items are more than enough.
To arrange everything in an organized manner, you can use a pre-arranged medical kit (available in every sports shop) or separately buy all the items and put them in a sealed plastic envelope. So you will need to find a space in the bags attached to the bike to house the kit.