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Travel Advice - Footloose and fancy free – how to travel light.
If you are going to be taking a vacation focused on driving, hiking,
museum hopping, or just wandering, try to travel light.
- See if you can get by with one, medium sized bag that contains all
that you will need for the duration of the trip
- Although it does not work for everyone or for every vacation, you
should try traveling with one piece of luggage in the form of a bag that
would fit under an airplane seat.
- In general, you should choose a soft-sided bag, approximately 9x22
x14 constructed of durable material.
- An example of this type of bag is shown below. We travel with an
Eagle Creek product, a Company that makes top quality luggage for
the mobile traveler.
- A good quality bag of this type is sold by Magellan.
The ideal trip luggage. The map is shown to provide scale
Traveling with one, moderate sized, suitcase makes traveling a lot more
enjoyable.
- When we used to carry large bags, it never failed that halfway
through the trip my shoulders and arms would start hurting from carrying
our herd of luggage.
- Each bag seemed to weigh a ton. When we returned home, my wrists and
elbows would ache for weeks.
- To top it off, I would wind up bringing home clothes that I had not
worn.
- For some reason I was never invited to the queen’s banquet and did
not need all that sporty stuff I lugged halfway around the world.
- Of course, carrying a small bag helps avoid the comment made by a
porter at a hotel in Hawaii who asked us "Have you heard of washing
machines?"
After deciding to carry a single, medium sized, bag on our trips, my
aches and pains related to bag carrying disappeared. It was easy to pack
and unpack. Getting ready to leave the hotel and pack the car took a lot
less time. And choosing what to wear was a lot easier. However, I
appreciated the small bag most of all because they gave me a flexibility
that I had never dreamed of when I carried multiple, large bags.
When you pull one bag out of your closet to pack for a trip, the first
thing you are going to say is “I can’t fit my stuff in there”. Well, you
can fit what you need in there but you have to be flexible and
practical.
- It is a little known fact that the United States is not the only
place in the world that has laundry facilities.
- When we travel in Europe, we often take our soiled clothes to a
local laundry, drop them off and pick them up at the end of the day.
- Doing so is neither expensive nor inconvenient.
- Between trips to the laundry, we wash whatever we need in the
bathroom sink at our hotel and hang them to dry overnight.
- Many hotel tubs come with a built in clothes line.
- To be safe you can buy a portable clothes line constructed of
two suction cups connected by strong cord and use it whenever you
need to dry something.
- Also, take a couple of packs of Woolite (available at most
travel stores). It takes up little space and really gets
clothes clean.
So, if we have convinced you to do some laundry, how about trying to
cut your clothes down to just enough to fit in one 9x22x14-inch bag?
- You will need to reduce the amount of clothes that you normally
would carry in a larger suitcase.
- If the seasons require travel with a jacket, wear it on the
flight.
- If you want to take a sports coat, wear it on the flight.
- In order to deal with inclement weather, we suggest that you pack or
wear a waterproof parka and be prepared to layer clothes, if the weather
turns cold.
- It is necessary to be ingenious to fit everything into one bag. We
give you some pointers in our articles on
packing and
clothes selection.
We think traveling with a small bag will work for you if you are
willing to give it a try. You might want to experiment with a single bag
on a local trip. We routinely take ours on European excursions varying
from 10 to 20 days in length.
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