This is an area where we had great advice from Sam and others, and learned even more as we went. We eventually came to a system that works well for someone traveling around the world with a single checked suitcase and one carry-on.
Part of the key is to get “cubes” and “envelopes” – zippered pouches about the size of five shirts. They are available from Eagle Creek and Rick Steve’s. By separating clothes into a couple of these, you can rearrange and hunt for any piece by just juggling to find the right cube and meanwhile all your clothes remain neatly packed. You can also easily move clothes into a drawer for a longer stay and then move them back to the bag when it is time to go. The modularity keeps you organized.
Main Suitcase – Eagle Creek Hovercraft Upright 28 (the kids and Gina fit into a 25 but I needed the 28 to carry textbooks and the electronics kit. Once the textbooks were completed and we hit Africa, this became room for safari binoculars, flashlights, a khaki-colored fleece and souvenirs.)
Lining the bottom: the school books, until completed
Envelope One: 3 shorts (2 khaki, 1 green) and 3 long quick-dry pants (khaki, green, dark grey). I used three shorts during the heat of summer in Greece & Turkey, but after that two would have been fine.
Envelope Two: 4 nice short-sleeve button-down quick-dry shirts with collars, 3 long-sleeve plain cotton golf shirts with V-necks (colors corresponding to pants), 1 dark wool sweater that is ideally thin and warm. Make sure it is a roomy sweater. Mine shrank around the stomach and became unwearable.
Envelope Three: wrinkle-free dress khakis, dress shirt, and tie. Leave your sports coat at home – you almost never truly need to have one. The tie plus dark sweater are enough. In fact if your quick-dry khakis are not completely ugly then you can just wear those instead of formal khakis, and I only wore the tie twice. About two-thirds of the way through I realized I had gone months without using this heavy “dress-up” envelope at all and just mailed it all home to Boston… and still ate in plenty of fancy places. The only exception is the Orient Express as formal wear is required. I bought a lightweight jacket off the rack in Singapore for that and mailed it home right after.
Cube One: 3 white ankle socks, 6 dark dress socks, 7 comfortable cotton boxers. I tried the super-duper lightweight microfabric wonder-travel boxers at $18 each, and they resoundingly stink. Go comfort.
Cube Two: 5 rolled T-shirts (3 short, 2 long), 1 swimsuit, swim goggles
Cube Three: electronics (see separate post) excluding however the items in backpack below
A Long Skinny Cube: unused camera lenses
Top Inner Pocket: spare prescription eyeglasses (never needed because we brought them), aerosols, sunscreen, shampoo
Large Bottom Inner Pocket: a laundry-bag. Just pull this bag out when you get to a new hotel, add dirty clothes during your stay, and shove the whole bag back into the bottom inner pocket when you are ready to leave.
Top Out Pocket: not much
Bottom Outer Pocket: 2 pairs shoes, lightweight mega-awesome Marmot raincoat with hood, compressible Tilley cloth hat with wide brim and chin string, a tiny umbrella (probably could have skipped but convenient and we did use). You can get by traveling with 3 pairs of shoes: nice and comfortable walking leather loafers like Clarks or Merrell’s – you will go through several pairs, somber dark brown Timberland sneakers that can get you through a horse ride and still look OK with khaki pants in a restaurant, and ideally some kind of sturdy waterproof sandals like closed-toe Tivas that could also get you through a horse ride as well. The overlap in function is necessary here ; we lost or got soaked or wore out shoes or broke laces on several occasions.
Phew! Depending on books, that all weighs between 20 and 26 kgs in the Upright 28.
Theft is a real concern for airline luggage, especially in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. It is a good idea to have a small combination lock but we did not think of that in advance. There are two quick and dirty ways to secure your luggage at the airport: (1) at check-in, ask for a free “plastic tie”. This self-gripping cord and loop will thread through your zipper handles and has to be cut off with a scissors; (2) prior to check-in, have your luggage cocoon-wrapped in thick plastic for a charge of $7 or so. You will see stands for this at many airports – a good reminder that theft is an issue at that location. The thick wrapping also requires scissors to cut off and would leave such a big pile of plastic that no one could do so without making a mess. We used one or the other method in the regions listed above and escaped without any loss.
The Eagle creek bags were fraying a bit at the corners but still working well by the end of the year. Someone broke off one of Carter’s little zipper handles about halfway through and he just used the other one. Then in May we flew TACA, the dodgy national Panamanian airline that took us from Costa Rica to Santiago. I gave them a bag that had survived 20 countries in perfect condition and they scraped the front severely and broke the main handle. We were not wholly surprised as everything about this airline screams corner-cutting, such as the thin seat cushions, limited number of toilets on the flight and poor food. Avoid TACA. Conversely, all of our flights on LAN were excellent.
Gina also brought a foldable bag – an REI collapsible nylon duffel (medium) that folds up into a tiny pocket. Whenever we start to get a lot of souvenirs, we opened up this bag and kept them here and if needed we could check the bag onto a flight. As the bag got full, we knew it was time to ship the contents home in a box.
Carrying just 7 boxers for 365 days, laundry is inescapable. Many frequent travelers carry laundry detergent and scrub their small items in a sink, but that would not work as well for bigger pieces, nor was it a desirable way to spend our time. We scrubbed by hand maybe a dozen times around the year and usually just a few pieces; although we carried a rubber laundry line for bigger loads we only used it once. The easy answer was hotel laundry, pricing out to $50 per load PER PERSON, and we did succumb to that in a pinch from time to time. Eventually we discovered that nearly every hotel district has a laundry cleaner somewhere nearby. Your guide will know exactly where this is. So all you do is take your laundry bag with you in the morning and ask to stop by and drop off your bag. Half the time they are already doing laundry for the same hotel where you are staying, and they can deliver the clean clothes straight to your hotel room! The cost for laundry by the pound is vastly cheaper than through the hotel. Lastly, we found just 3 or 4 hotels that offered the ultimate – FREE laundry service! Much appreciated.
Carry-On Packing
For some reason, the carry-on bag was the hardest luggage decision for me. I ended up buying and returning several different models, wrestling with a basic conflict between large and small.
The carry-on had to be large because the laptop required lots of padding, plus there must be room for a sweater or jacket, papers and books, pens and desk supplies, a big camera if they only allow one carry-on, then airplane necessities like face mask, earplugs, a mouse, spare batteries, iPod, CDs or DVDs, back-up medicines, and all the other junk you would keep in your briefcase.
But the carry-on also had to be small, because we would be walking for miles! And then we would only need a fraction of the materials and definitely not the laptop.
So I looked at bags with wheels that had hidden flimsy back-pack straps, or back-packs that had laptop pouches but would either be too small or too heavy, or heavy suitcases with removable front pockets that could zip off to become daybags. None of these hybrids were optimal.
The way to solve this? A small back-pack, a large back-pack, and carrying the camera separately.
The small back-pack was the Eagle Creek Packable Daypack. It is fabulously lightweight – folding into a few ounces of nylon you could fit into your breast pocket – yet has padded straps. The size is sufficient. We ended up carrying this blue back-pack every single day and we LOVED it. You keep absolute necessities in the small front zippered pocket at all times (eyeglass cloth and cleaner, Kleenex, Purell in a plastic bag, aspirin, a tiny stick of sunblock, a Chapstick, a spare set of earphones) and a few more in the main compartment (a pen and tiny hotel pad, a sunglass case). On daytrips, that leaves most of the main compartment available for spare hat, clothing, sunscreen, insect repellant, umbrella, a sandwich, souvenirs, bottles of water or whatever the day requires.
The larger back-pack and workhorse on travel days was a black Jansport Airlift. That is a medium-sized back-pack that any college student might have and is only notable for its extra-comfy straps. In the back compartment there is a compartment with thin padding; that is where I put the VAIO, sealed into a laptop case for added protection. There was also room here for a big flat zippered plastic envelope from Staples with a pad of paper, pen, and school papers. Next, another zipper opened the central compartment which was big and kept empty except on travel days. Then zippered pockets on the front organized the pens, cellphone, earplugs and other little items. This is also where I kept a spare AC-USB power adapter and mini-USB cord, to recharge a smartphone or a Kindle in a pinch.
So on airplane days, I just rolled the tiny Daybag backpack up (with all the necessities still inside and still available) and stuck that roll vertically on the left side of the center compartment of the Jansport. Then I could roll up the fleece and put that vertically on the right, leaving both daybag and fleece accessible while traveling. The VAIOs power cube rested nicely on top, along with noise-cancelling headphones for those long air flights (a weight indulgence that we added only after all those road school books had been cleared out). Once we reached the next hotel, I pulled out the daybag and fleece right out of the Jansport, and we could start touring immediately.
The drawback of this approach rather than something even bigger is that there is no room for the camera bag. But the camera bag came with its own shoulder strap and could easily be carried outside the Jansport. Although most airlines say you can only have one carry on, they never complained once about the camera being separate. The only issue then is to remember that you have two carry-ons and not to forget especially the small camera case which I ended up putting in the overhead bin on most flights.
After you go to baggage collection, if you want to roll everything at once, you can cross the backpack straps into an X and slide them over the handle of the rollable luggage. But since my laptop was inside I did not want to take any risk about the backpack slipping off and falling, so I just wore the backpack.
Depending on contents, the fully loaded Jansport was 7kg and the camera case was 1-2kg.
The laptop case was a hard shell case ordered online from Evolve. I loved the hardness of this as it really protected the PC. But it turned out slightly too large for the VAIO and as a result, the VAIO could shift inside when using the smaller battery. That might have contributed to some of the line-outs that appeared toward the end of the journey, or it might not as the SONY screen was fairly new and flimsy. In hindsight I should have used a perfectly fitting case and just eliminated the chance of breakage here. The kids had normal soft-padded cases for their Acers and had zero issues.
Overall, this configuration worked well and could sustainably keep us going the whole year.
