Last modified on November 12th, 2021 at 9:50 am

Arrive Outdoors: Rent The Best Camping Gear For Bike Tours In The USA

The Right Time To Go Bike Camping

Summer is definitely the right time to take a bike tour and go camping. The weather is warm and the sun is shining every day.

Yet there is something to be said for touring and camping in the fall when the leaves start to turn in the northern states.

The landscape looks as if nature took a paintbrush to the trees!

And if you really think about it, even southern states in the U.S. have great mild weather to camp during the winter months.

Truly, there is no season of the year in which you couldn’t go on a bike tour and camping adventure.

More Millennials Are Going Camping

Even during a pandemic, going camping is the ultimate in social distancing!

Camping adventures are always a fun way to get out of your rut and explore Mother Nature.

It seems as if everyone has had a camping experience that brings back good memories.

Those good times stay with us and enrich our lives.

According to the 2019 North American Camping Report over the past five years, more than 7.2 million households in the United States have begun camping.

This brings the total number of camping households in the U.S. to a record high of 78.8 million in 2018.

Out of that number, millennials with children are among the most avid groups of campers, with 63% camping more than seven nights per year.

The majority of those campers—59 percent—reported using tents as their primary form of camping accommodation, rather than renting cabins.

The Problem With Camping Gear

If we love getting away and building good memories, why don’t more of us up and go?

Part of the reason is that while it might be easy to camp around the home, seeing other parts of your state or even another state entirely means you need gear, and you have to haul that gear.

It seems that most of us would rather spend our money on experiences, rather than products.

You’ll need a tent, sleeping bag, something to cook on and pots to cook with.

Not all of us have all the necessary gear, the place to store the gear when not in use, and the desire to pack and haul it around.

There is no doubt that you would take more camping trips if you could just show up and the gear would be there on the spot when you arrived.

If you didn’t have to purchase, store and haul gear, it would be feasible to take more trips, even over a weekend, if you didn’t have to worry about transporting gear.

Arrive To The Rescue

What if there was another, better way to experience new places and camp where you have never been before, but not have the hassle of hauling gear?

Now there is. Arrive Outdoors is a 2016 startup based out of Santa Monica, California.

Married couple Rachelle Snyder and Ross Richmond found themselves in the same quandary that many others have experienced.

They wanted to camp and explore, especially when they were traveling, but the issue of hauling gear along for the ride made that nearly impossible.

Coupled with Rachelle and Ross’s desire to experience the outdoors sustainably, the idea to provide a service that allowed you to rent equipment was born.

Arrive’s service is especially helpful for someone new to camping that just wants to experience a trip before taking the plunge into purchasing.

It is also perfect for those who live in an apartment and don’t have the storage space.

Whatever the reason might be, you can now go camping without the expense and hassle of owning your gear.

Choose Your Gear

With the advent of Arrive, you have the perfect option of being able to use premium outdoor gear without having to purchase, store, maintain, or schlepp the gear.

You can choose items to rent a la carte or a pre-packaged kit like the popular Bike Touring camping set for one.

This pre-packaged kit contains all the main basic items you would need. It includes:

Tent: Big Agnes Copper Spur HV UL1 Bikepack
Marmot Trestles Eco Elite 30 Degree Sleeping Bag

Therm-a-Rest NeoAir UltraLight Sleeping Pad
Black Diamond Spot Headlamp
MSR Alpine 2 Pot Set

MSR PocketRocket Deluxe Stove

The total weight of these items is an easy eight pounds, which is perfect for your bike tour.

Tent

Specially designed for bike tour, The Big Agnes Copper Spur tent . The Copper Spur tent comes with Big Agnes’s latest “green” poles.

They are anodized without a chemical polishing stage, and that eliminates two hazardous chemicals from the process.

This bikepack tent comes in a bikepacking-ready compression sack built to attach to the handlebars of your bike.

Two Voile or two Revelate straps work best to connect the sack. Made from a silicone treated rip-stop nylon, this bikepack tent has a waterproof polyurethane coating.

Sleeping Bag

A mummy-style sleeping bag, perfect for your bike tour. This bag will keep you warm even when the temperature dips to 30 degrees.

Filled with SpiraFil high-loft insulation, the Trestles retained warmth, softness, and compressibility.

The high-loft insulation also provides moisture resistance. The wave construction will give your warmth on top, and a plush feel on the bottom.

Sleeping pad

When on a biking tour, you don’t want to be weighed down by your gear, but you also want to be comfortable at night.

The UltraLight is ideal as it is lightweight and packs down very small, less than a one-liter bottle. It weighs just 16 ounces and has a 4.2 R-value.

Headlamp

An excellent headlamp with 300 lumens of brightness and IPX8 waterproofing makes it water-resistant, but not waterproof.

You can get up to 175 hours of battery life in low power mode and 30 in high power mode. A battery indicator will let you know how much charge you have left.

A light 3.1 ounces, the Spot has a wide-angle so that you can see well in whatever path you are on.

Pot set

A classic set made from sturdy stainless steel, the Alpine is just over a pound for the whole set.

It measures 8 inches by about 4 inches and includes a 1.5 and a 2-liter pot and a lid that can double as a plate.

All of these pieces stow neatly into its bag.

Stove

This small canister stove has excellent fuel efficiency and can boil water relatively quickly if out of the wind. It has a piezo igniter and weighs a mere 3 ounces.

High End Gear

Arrive partners with about 40 premium brands so that the equipment you will be renting will be top of the line gear that is modern and convenient.

It will cost about 15% of what purchasing the equipment would.

How Arrive Works

The way Arrive works is simple and easy. You can order anywhere from one year to one week out from your planned camping date.

Choose what you want online, like the Bike Touring camping set for one. Arrive’s service is available in the contiguous U.S.

You can have the gear sent to your home, to a hotel, an Airbnb or one of 10,000+ FedEx locations.

Any FedEx center that allows deliveries, like those at pharmacies, will also be a location of drop off and returns.

The gear will be delivered by 8 pm the evening before your first-day rental. Arrive stays in touch before your trip and lets you know when your gear has arrived at its destination.

Not only that, Arrive offers 24/7 customer service. At the end of your trip, repack the box with the camping gear, affix the free return label and drop it off for its return trip.

Ease, Convenience and Sustainability

Perhaps one of the best features that Arrive offers is the knowledge that you are participating in a sustainable venture that gets you out into nature and protects and preserves nature at the same time.

It is far less wasteful and healthier for the environment to reuse products than to generate new, and Arrive does just that.

You can also rest assured that when the gear comes back after each excursion, each piece of gear goes through Arrive’s quality assurance process at their California warehouse.

Using the Center For Disease Control’s (CDC) Recreate Responsible guidelines and recommendations from the National Park Service, the gear is inspected and cleaned.

When Arrive gear is replaced with newer models, the older gear is donated or sold, thus continuing the sustainability factor.