Given that we're doing more flying on discount airlines here in Europe, we need to be able to stay below their weight and size limits to avoid paying extra.
And even if we get something lighter weight, we wouldn't necessarily bring more stuff with us! The idea is to travel light, and the lighter your stuff is, the easier it is to manage your gear.
With a smaller bag, we're pretty sure we can still fit in the amount of clothing that we bring. We've learned quite a few good packing tips over the years. The most important one was packing with zip lock bags! I know that many people use packing cubes, but we feel that they are added weight as well, and they don't compact like a zip lock bag does.
You simply sort your items into two or three ziplock bags and compact them as much as possible to get the air out. Sit on them if you have to! Then, they fit easily into a smaller bag. Yes, you still have to be careful not to go over the weight limit of your airline because it's always tempting to fill up the space in your bag!
Here's one of the bags we're looking at...
It's a shame that they don't have a Canadian version of the website, so we'll have to wait until we're in the U.S. to be able to order it at a decent price. And as always, we'll be watching for it to come on sale in the meantime.
They have quite a few other travel gear items as well. Check out the "travel accessories" page for some interesting stuff...I like the money belt!
We still swear by our 10 year guarantee IT Worlds lightest luggage in the carry on size. Can't fault them and enough space to do us for a 12 month all season trip. Worth checking out maybe?
ReplyDeleteThey look nice too but we are trying to find a bag that is super light and can be used as a roller bag and also convert to a backpack when needed. We haven't had to use our backpack feature on the bags we already have too often but when we have done we are happy to have it.
DeleteInteresting about the ziplock bags. I travel quite a bit for work (~8x/year including one or two international) and have found that "rolling" my clothes allow a better fit over folding. Now just to condense down the amount of toiletries this high maintenance girl needs! lol Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteWe have been using the ziplock bag trick now for a few years and really love it. It also makes it easy to find what you are looking for because we generally put all our tops into one bag, bottoms in another and underwear in another so all you have to do is pull out the one you need and it doesn't disturb the rest of your things. We really had to look around for big enough bags that have a zip on the top though!
Delete