overburdened

Edinburgh, 2016

I used to be a maximalist packer.

True story: 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. Unlike our recent trip to Texas for a wedding, we did not pack wisely.

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, cameras, extra batteries, and lots of film.

We did not have packing cubes, so everything was jumbled together in the duffle bags, which was just an organizational nightmare. Our clothing choices were not always wise — I have no idea why I thought I needed actual hiking boots for this trip, but I packed them because that’s what the guidebooks suggested. That the boots were a half size too small and not at all comfortable was another ridiculous aspect of this scenario.

And this was right before rolling bags became a thing, so we were hauling all of this around on our shoulders. It was truly ridiculous. 0/10, do not recommend in any way.

Did we lighten up our loads after that? Marginally.

We switched to rolling suitcases and continued to check our bags until the 2010s. We often would share a suitcase, so we did have only that one. Once we had children, the four of us would share two rolling suitcases. Still, those suitcases were large, unwieldy, and often bordered on being too heavy by airline standards, especially since we were all committed to bringing books, plus we were still packing too many clothes in an effort to not need to do laundry very often if at all.

Eventually, we started fine-tuning our packing.

We switched to smaller, carry-on-sized rolling bags, although a trip to Venice in late 2013 convinced us to get away from rolling bags and switch to backpacks. Rolling bags on cobblestone streets and sidewalks is both cumbersome and noisy.

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 and England, 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. We had e-readers instead of books. We planned to do laundry as we went.

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.

All this is to say, we didn’t start off as minimal packers. It took us well over a decade — honestly more like two decades — to get anywhere close to it and even now we’re all still learning and fine-tuning things.

What kind of packer are you? And what have you learned along the way?