Travelling Light—Part 1
Musings—Feb 01, 2010
The Blessings and Challenges of Carry-on Luggage
The next couple of blogs I’m writing are going to be about travelling light. If I get on a real rant, which I expect is very likely to happen, I may end up with many blogs about this topic. You see, I am a self-confessed carry-on-bag-kind-of-woman. I have this weird streak (I actually think it’s an endearing quality, it’s the people who watch me pack that think it’s weird) to see if I can just use a carry-on bag (or smaller) when I go anywhere. Doesn’t matter if I’m going for 3 days or 2 weeks. I don’t think I inherited this gene from anyone. It’s a gene I grew all by myself.
My sister said to me awhile ago, as I was pondering out loud on the phone with her about whether I’d pack a particular item or not, “You’re obsessed! Why don’t you just take a suitcase like everyone else instead of trying to get everything in just a carry-on bag”. I’m sure there might have been a few other adjectives she used to describe my obsessiveness….I mean my keenness to travel light, but I’ve chosen to not recall them.
So, I’ve got a dark past with big-ish sized suitcases. I’ve travelled with a very heavy, large backpack (with no wheels to easy the load from my back) through long check in lines at the airport. I’ve had to carry this same backpack to the opposite end of a large airport from where I was standing.
I’ve had to try and cram a family member’s (she’ll go unnamed, but she knows who she is!) 3 LARGE suitcases in the trunk of my small car, only to end up putting one of them between two poor souls in the backseat of the car, while my sister enjoyed the spacious front seat. I swear that one of them is so large that I feel very confident that I could get inside it and zip it up around me. How does a person come for a visit with 2 large suitcases and then end up going home with 3 large ones? That’s a rhetorical question because I’m not really looking for an answer – I already know the answer. I remember this same family member coming for a visit, many years ago, carrying her toiletry and make-up items in a bag that was so large I thought that that was her suitcase (and I’m not exaggerating, and she know’s I’m not stretching the truth just to make my point). The unnamed family member wanted me to let you know that she now packs “lighter” – meaning 1 large suitcase, 1 medium suitcase, and 1 backpack.
My mom has had her suitcases ‘lost’ by the airlines more than once. She got one of them back, but only after she returned home from her trip. The others and all the items in them could likely be seen somewhere for sale on eBay or when the airlines have an auction for ‘unclaimed’ luggage. I have a vague recollection of seeing a blurb on TV or in the newspaper awhile back about a woman who purchased hundreds (thousands?) of unclaimed pieces of luggage and she was going to write a book or make a television show about the things found in the suitcases. Talk about a treasure hunt! I wonder if she has my mom’s stuff?
There’s another person I know who I’m sure would also prefer to be left anonymous, but he takes a huge duffel bag even when he is just going away overnight. He claims I ‘ram and cram’ everything into this little suitcase and he ‘wants plenty of space’. He also claims he needs to have extra room in his suitcase so that he’ll have enough room for my stuff when I come pleading to him to carry stuff that won’t go into my bag.
It has taken years, but now we leave each other alone and we take whatever size bag we want to use with little or no cajoling about how ‘wrong’ we each are.
Have you ever planned for a trip and said to yourself (and anyone else who would listen), “I’m travelling light this time”? This time you vow to only take a carry-on sized bag. Well, lots of people say it, but then those good intentions fly out the window when they actually start to pack.
My next blog will begin to unravel and explore the mysterious aura that surrounds the carry-on bag traveller, and the dark cloud that hangs over the large suitcase lugger.
