There are some lovely camping-by-bicycle videos on the internet. Like the web’s gardening videos, virtual bikepacking owes a lot to the beauty of the terrain. My gardens would look marvelous with an Irish estate in the background. My bikepacking ventures would be greatly enhanced if I could teleport myself to New Mexico, Colorado, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula or New Zealand. But I prefer the real thing: loading up my bike and heading out to camp.

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where I live, the safest way to take a long trip by bicycle is to get on the Mississippi River levee and not get off until you reach New Orleans, 70 winding miles south.

Camping is camping no matter how you reach your destination. A growing number of cyclists, thanks to the popularity of e-bikes, are, in the words of the internet videos, prepared to take just what they need and need just what they take.

Loading a lightweight, compact sleeping bag, groundpad, tent, panniers (saddle bags) and cooking kit on an e-bike designed to carry cargo is the way to go. It’s worth the price of gear made for backpacking. How much e-bike your credit card can carry is another consideration.

E-bike design and batteries get better every time I drool over the adverts. Among the considerations are choosing a machine that will haul your weight, the weight of the e-bike and your load which may be distributed over the length of the bicycle or pulled in a trailer. The lighter the trailer the better.

Camping companions

For riders like me, whose camping closets are outdoor gear museums, it’s easy to throw what I need plus a lot of stuff I don’t need but might need into the bed of my pickup truck and head out. Bikepacking requires some thought. My bicycle is a 25-year-old Gary Fisher mountain bike. I select old serviceable gear from the closet, careful not to bite off more than I care to haul for 50 miles before stopping.

Most of Louisiana is as flat as a bread board. The most climbing I do is getting up the ramp from River Road to the levee.

This brings me to the most difficult part of bikepacking for me, rounding up companions to go with me. My younger pals think nothing of 50 to 100 miles to the first stop. Older friends, men and women in their 60s and 70s, would rather spend their time and money out West, back East or in Europe on buses or trains.

At 78, the owner of four bicycles, including a sleek electric Luna Stealth, and the aforementioned antique camping swag, I tell my reluctant friends to recall a time when they thought nothing of cramming into their school knapsacks what they’d need for one night, climb onto their tank-like Columbias and Schwinns and make for the woods. It was “Stand By Me” without the corpse.

“Don’t overthink this,” I say. They’ll think about it, they say.

A big part of older friends’ reluctance to bikepacking is my example. I’m not saying I look unhoused packed for camping, but a lady at a church fair booth approached me during a cycling rest break with a free, doubled paper plate heaped with chicken and sausage jambalaya and green salad.

“Here, dear,” she said, handing me a soft drink and producing a plastic fork and napkin from her apron.

“Oh, God,” my wife said. “What did you do?”

“I said, ‘Thank you.’”

All around the world

Bruce Schultz, 70, a colleague from my newspaper days, spent six weeks last year riding in Chile. Adam Rouillier, 41, an operator at a chemical plant, enjoys the company of bikepacking racers. Rouillier doesn’t compete. He drafts along with the racers for days and hundreds of miles.

“I just like being out there,” he said cheerfully.

Michael Rasch, a 43-year-old bicycle builder and mechanic, is a money rider, figuratively speaking. There is no money in race bikepacking. His sponsor is his wife, Angela, who has a corporate job and health insurance of which Michael avails himself a lot.

The survivor of more than 30 auto wrecks — “Most of them me not driving” — and cycling crashes — “No idea how many,” Rasch lives with pain. To ride more erect, he has raised the handle bars of his racing bicycle to the point that he looks like he’s praying. On a tall man’s bicycle, Rasch, at 6 feet, 3 inches, calls himself a “neon giraffe.”

Camping for bikepack racers is pretty much anticipation and celebratory group campouts. Racers eat like bears before hibernation and then burn, burn, burn the calories. They race night and day, on snow and ice, past swamps and up hills of gravel and worse.

Rasch rides hundreds of miles with just the food and water on his bicycle. He finished second in a race of 250 miles with rest stops totaling 20 minutes.

Doesn’t it hurt?

“It hurts a lot,” he said, “but it hurts more if I don’t do it.”

His bikepacking gods are riders in their 70s. Rasch’s ambition is to build his own brand of bicycles for mortals, as well as elite men and women riders whose performance is not age based.

Bikepacking tips

For some tips on bikepacking, take a look at Bikepacking for “Reader’s Rig: Michael’s Custom Irraschional Titanium” and Bikepacking Roots, Rouillier’s volunteer contributions. Google “loading a bicycle for bikepacking.” Ignore the torrent of words that start with what the presenter had for breakfast. Turn the sound off. Pay attention to the video.

Bikepackers love going places on bicycles. Right now, one of them is pondering a pedal-powered-paddle across the Atlantic Ocean. I don’t know who the cyclist is, but I bet you a brass Presta valve adapter he’s holed up in a garage trying to bolt swim fins to the rear wheel of an old Cannondale.

On a mountain road in Chile or a high and windy hill in northern Mississippi, Schultz and Rouillier like the accessibility to other humans that cycling affords. If touring cyclists are a little different, bikepackers are just strange. They’ll give you their last spare tube, and their gear is rather specialized.

Cycling the Natchez Trace or following the Mississippi River, there are few official campsites. Bikepackers don’t need no stinking permission to camp. They stealth camp. Schultz favors a black tent, Rouillier a Nemo Dragonfly tent in hunter green with shades of brown.

“You ever have trouble finding your tent?” I asked Rouillier.

“No sir,” he said. “But I see what you mean.”

I have not traveled far on my humble bikepacking treks, but I have a story about cycling’s have and have nots.

I had thrown gear and bicycle into the back of my pickup for the 45-minute drive to my friend Ray’s place in hilly West Feliciana Parish north of Baton Rouge. The connecting highway, U.S. Hwy. 61, inspired the song “Me and Bobby McGee” and is home to 18-wheelers and speeding cars.

Leaving Ray’s driveway at Star Hill on my Gary Fisher, I was bound for Nora’s, another friend, who lives about 20 miles from Ray in a house built before the Civil War. She lets me tent camp under her oak allée with whatever dog is spending the night out.

I hadn’t gotten a half-mile, when I was overtaken by some middle-age swells on $2,000 road bikes. Their attire suggested they’d just ridden off the pages of a cycling magazine. Their thing was flying around the country with their bicycles, departing airports for a day of riding. They’d read that the Felicianas were good cycling country. And they were right.

The lead swell hove to on my port side and spoke, “Good morning. How many days you been on the road?” (Thinking: “How’s the tour of Salvation Army shelters going?”)

“Oh, I started back at that last driveway,” I said, nothing if not jaunty.

The guy gave me a look that said, “Bud, I’m just trying to be a friend on the road.”

He kicked it up a notch as he and his party left me to ponder what had just happened. A minute later, I was distracted by a prothonotary warbler. Two hours later, I was greeted by Nora’s German shepherd, Hope.

The next morning, I made coffee and grits on Nora’s front steps under Hope’s lopsided grin.