On Erwin Sikkens’ first cycling tour, he set out with a set of home-made panniers, a pair of military surplus backpacks he “refurbished”.

“I cut the the shoulder straps off and put some bolt-on clamps and basically created my own panniers. They worked OK for a while, but eventually they died. By the end I was using more straps and duct tape to keep them running than there was original rucksack.”

While these bags may not have been made to quite the same standard as Brooks’ own panniers, there is something admirable about the spirit of do-it-yourself ingenuity. And perhaps it’s that adventurous nature that has brought the Dutchman to prominence in the world of bikepacking, gravel riding and route-making over the past few years. His desire to give things a try and figure it out along the way.

For Sikkens, it was actually a trip to Eroica Limburg as a guest of Brooks that opened his eyes to the glory of gravel. 

“It all got kickstarted by Brooks inviting me to do this crazy old bike ride in the south-east of the Netherlands.

“If you ride road bikes in the Netherlands that area is like Valhalla. It has all of our hills, but it’s the size of a postage stamp. Very soon you know all the tarmac by heart. To go there and go on these ‘old roads’ which is what we call the gravel – it was a totally new experience in a very familiar area.”

He says he was hooked from the start.

“I loved it. I was sold immediately, but I thought the part I was sold on was the vintage bikes. I thought, ‘I don’t know what this is, but I love it’.”

Sikkens bought himself a vintage frame with down tube shifters, taking it out on the tarmac roads around his home… but something was missing.

“I started riding at home on an old bike in my wool jersey. And I thought, ‘This is not so much fun’. Then it landed that no, it wasn’t the bikes. It was the dirt roads we had been riding in Limburg that had made the experience so fun. That’s what I really liked and that is what ended up being the addiction that is gravel riding for me now.”

More recently, Sikkens has been heading out on a new kind of adventure with his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Nora, in tow. 

“I love doing this favourite activity with the most important person in my life now. My daughter. I’m bringing her into the world of riding bikes and being outside. And I hope, that I can kind of leave the iPads out of the equation as long as possible and give her that little happy life. You know, poking sticks in poo in the forest or something like that!”

There was a part of him that thought having children would bring the adventuring, bikepacking chapter of his life to an end. Luckily, he was wrong.

“I loved my life being a certain way, so much so that for a long time I didn’t want to have kids. I loved it and I didn’t want to lose that. So we always said, me and my girlfriend, if we have a child, we want to bring her into our lives rather than, you know, us going into that life and kind of disappearing.”

Sikkens’ advice for other parents is clear. 

“You don’t need to go to Rome or China or whatever immediately. We can just go do something basically 20 kilometres away on a nice little nature campsite and just test it out. At first, sure, you bring a lot more stuff than you need, but that’s the journey.” 

And what full grown touring cyclist can’t remember setting out on an early expedition overburdened with extra and unneeded items?