Issue 30: what we pack, and what we stopped packing
Readers asked. Here is the whole list, after eleven years of carrying too much...
The most-asked question in the inbox, by a distance, is what is in the bag. So here is the bag.
What is in it
- One bag, forty litres, that goes in the overhead. Never checked, not once, not since 2019.
- Three of everything that touches skin, and a sink.
- One jacket that does rain and one that does cold, which are not the same jacket.
- Shoes I can walk twenty kilometres in. The other pair stays home.
- A notebook, a pen, and the phone as a camera.
What we stopped packing
- A second pair of anything.
- Guidebooks. The good ones are online and the bad ones were never worth carrying.
- The camera. The phone is enough and the bag is lighter.
- Just in case. Whatever it is, you can buy it there.
The rule
If you have not used it in three trips, it leaves the bag. The bag has been getting lighter for eleven years and I have never once wished for the thing I left out.
One place, every Thursday
The letter, in your inbox, before it is on the site. Nothing else, ever.
Writes Signal from wherever he was last Thursday. Eleven years, sixty countries, one forty-litre bag.
Signal
A weekly travel letter: one place, one week, one opinion.