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!)