Travel Tips
Even a slow learner learns at last. Here, after 25 years of jetting about a few packing tips picked up the hard way. Now I bring these and only these things on an airplane:
- A small suitcase weighing no more than a lady’s purse
- One spare skirt or pair of pants
- Any number of Steve-Nicks-style tops or dresses, weighing less than the down on a baby duck
- The requisite undies and creams
I lived for nearly a week in Europe with just this in September and for nearly a week in Utah just now and it all worked great. I bought one of those super-lightweight-but-indestructible little suitcases that heaves right up into the overhead bin and I was SET. Everything else I carry in a backpack, everything being:
- the laptop, i-pod, phone
- the GPS for when I exit the ol’ rental car garage
- the wires for all the above, none of which are ever ever even faintly interchangeable
- Well-jacketed fruits like your orange or your apple (never the highly squooshable banana)
- Powdered milk, powdered coffee, powdered sugar substitute
- A toothbrush toothpaste and some floss
- A needle and thread but never any scissors natch.
- A bit of makeup but not too much out of respect for my healthy fear of Kabuki-style paint jobs
- Reading materials.On this latest trip I had Jonathan’s Franzen’s Freedom, Susan Cheever's Louisa May Alcott, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Michael Patrick MacDonald's All Souls, four old New Yorkers, two Times and a Newsweek.
Oh and my diary and my planner too so that even though the suitcase was easy to tote, the minute I swung theat backpack up onto my shoulders I almost fell right over backwards. Next task: conquer addiction to books made of paper and ink.
(Still, a BIG improvement. Yay for this old dog learning a new trick, with more new tricks ahead!)
