Great pics, that looks a brilliant wee tour. You carried a lot of gear: did you find you had too much ?
Mostly my rear panniers are full of bulk, not weight. I use a big self-inflating mattress (Alpkit Airic) because you can't beat a good night's sleep and a luxurious Sleeping Bag (Mountain Equipment Sleepwalker) for the same reason. They are both bulky items but I don't care as they make for a nicer experience. My friends complained of thin sleep mats and restricting sleeping bags.
I also used my new Vango Spirit 200+ tent. Another fairly bulky item but it's huge when erected and would make life a lot more bearable in the rain, something I expected which never occurred.
If I'd known that the rain would hold off I could have taken a lot less but the RT managed perfectly well and we were only aiming for around 90km a day so we could take our time, enjoy some nice lunches, and be on a campsite around 6pm.
We covered about 320km over the 4 days. To put that into perspective we did that distance every day for 4 days during Paris-Brest-Paris (and the qualifiers) so it was a great experience being able to forget about Audax time constraints and plod along, not caring about the clock.
