minimalist packing
Since it’s summer and vacation travel is in full swing, let’s talk about minimal packing. We’ll focus on non-car trips, particularly flights, buses, and train travel when one is limited in how much can be packed.
I used to be a maximalist packer1. The first time my husband and I traveled abroad together (1996), we spent two weeks in England and Scotland, followed by a long weekend in Tallinn, Estonia for a wedding. No joke, between the two of us we had two large duffel bags, a medium duffel bag, and a garment bag. We had clothes (including wedding outfits), guidebooks, other books, and cameras, extra batteries, and lots of film. This was right before rolling bags became a thing, so we were hauling all of this around on our shoulders. It was truly ridiculous.
After that, we started fine-tuning our packing. In the 2010s, we flew WOW Air several times, and on those flights we were forced to pack very, very light, as there were stringent weight restrictions. For one particular one-week trip to Scotland, our weight limit was something like 5 kg (about 11 pounds), so each of us packed around 3 shirts, 2 pairs of pants, and 1 pair of shoes.
That said, we still occasionally checked bags until our miserable experience in the Philly airport in the mid-2010s. Only then did we commit to carry-on only. I’ve never regretted this choice, especially when we have experiences like the chaotic 36 hours we spent trying to get home from Maui.
For packing light, we follow the usual rules:
We create packing lists in advance and follow them carefully. I have a base packing list in Excel and use that to create a new list for each trip. I don’t save every list I’ve ever made, but if I have specific notes about my packing at the end of a trip, I’ll add those to the list and save it for future reference.
We keep our toiletries minimal and are willing to buy more if needed, while not skimping on necessities. Since I don’t use a lot of products and tools, especially for my hair, I recognize that this is easy for me and won’t be for other people.
We don’t pack a lot of clothes in general and what we pack follows a color scheme. My central color is always black and my husband’s colors are navy blue and gray. (My very lightest packing ever was two outfits (one on my body and one in my bag) for 12 days in Portugal. Here’s the deal: No one who sees me when I travel is going to notice that I am wearing the same things over and over, and anyone who sees my photos on social media knows that I am an outfit repeater. And frankly, I don’t care about fashion when I travel; as long as I’m clean, comfortable, and presentable, that’s what matters to me.
We pack fabrics that are lightweight and not bulky. This can be tricky, especially if someone wants to wear jeans every day, but it is doable. I’ll talk more about this in another post.
Packing cubes are important for keeping everything tidy and compression cubes help smoosh clothes as small as possible.
We do laundry while we’re on the go. This means using washing machines in our rented home, which is mostly easy, but it also means hand washing when we’re in hotels. I know hand washing is a drag but we prefer it to finding a laundromat and schlepping our dirty clothes there, then hanging around while things wash and dry. On a few rare occasions, we’ve paid for our hotel to handle our laundry for us, but that is expensive and even then there are limitations. (In Botswana, for example, hotels would not wash underwear.) And let’s face it, not every item needs to be washed after each wear; underwear does of course, but definitely not jeans.
And this is really important: We have streamlined what we pack. We no longer bring lots of books or any sort of camera equipment other than our phones. Depending on our trip, we might bring phones and tablets or maybe a laptop, but we’ve frequently traveled with just our phones. This is risky since it means we’re relying heavily on small electronics that could be lost or broken, but we take that risk willingly in favor of the greater good.
There’s nothing earth-shattering about these rules and I’m sure you’ve read them countless other times in other articles.
To illustrate all this, I’m going to create hypothetical packing lists for both my husband and myself. The hypothetical trip will be similar to our 12-day trip to Portugal in September 2019, when we visited Porto, Coimbra, and Lisbon. Temperatures were 80-85 F (26-29 C).
For me:
3 outfits: 2 lightweight dresses, 1-2 shirts, 1 pair of casual linen trousers
1 lightweight cardigan or jacket
2 pairs of very comfortable shoes: Allbirds sneakers (plus socks) and Birkenstock sandals
3-4 days of undergarments
1 folding sun hat
something to sleep in
basic toiletries, with liquids decanted into smaller reusable containers
My husband:
3 outfits: 3 shirts, 3 shorts
2 pairs of shoes: both sneakers, plus a few pairs of socks
3-4 days of undergarments
1 hat
toiletries
We’ll both have:
our phones and chargers
possibly our tablets and chargers
earbuds, mostly for the flights
glasses and sunglasses
small first aid pouch, including any medications we take
passports, Euros
reusable water bottles (1 each)
folding grocery bags (1 each)
other small miscellaneous things, including pens, a sewing kit, hand sanitizer, face masks, plus I always have some small snacks for the flights, including some sort of chocolate bar
That’s it. That’s probably more clothing than we’d need, but I recognize that not everyone likes wearing the same things repeatedly.
In terms of bags, we each would carry a small-to-medium backpack in the 20-30 liter range. Pete also packs a small folding day pack for daily carry and I always have a small crossbody bag.
Fitting everything into our backpacks happens via the aforementioned packing cubes and mostly non-bulky clothes. As I said earlier, I’ll write a separate post about clothes soon.
But that’s how I do things. I want to hear from y’all. Tell me what kind of packer you are and what you would add or subtract from my packing lists.
Full disclosure: When we go on a car trip, minimalism goes out the window. Example: For a trip to the beach earlier this year, I packed my favorite 40-liter backpack for my clothes and had a large tote bag for my hats, toiletries, and other things that did not fit. I also had a full cooler, two large bags of groceries, six folding beach chairs, and four beach umbrellas.