How to Pack For 10 Days In a Carry-On | Hacker News Reader

How to Pack For 10 Days In a Carry-On

nytimes.com

42 pointssamratjp36 comments

Pfft...10 days is amateur hour. I just came back from a trip to France where I did nearly a month out of a single carry-on. Part of the strategy is to depend on the amenities of the country you're visiting: most places have laundromats, and so you can get away with carrying a week's worth of socks, underwear and shirts, knowing that you'll be doing laundry every week. Same with stuff like soap, towels, shampoo, etc. You can (usually) find it there.

The heaviest things to pack are shoes, pants, sweaters and coats. Buy the right shoes, and you'll get by with one pair. Likewise for pants: you only really need two pairs, and if you're really intent on traveling light, you can find exceptionally lightweight nylon pants that look dressy enough for most situations, and that don't wrinkle. Sweaters and coats are a little tougher, but if you count your body as a piece of baggage, you can minimize the burden: for this trip, I carried two sweaters and a hoodie, and was pretty much always wearing one of the three items. The other two were in the bag.

The other important thing to do is to make sure that everything coordinates in all possible combinations. The easiest way to do this is to buy everything in shades of black or gray, but you can be more creative, just so long as your pants, shoes, shirts and sweaters are interchangeable. Master this, and you can go for a surprisingly long time off of five days worth of clothing.

For this trip, I had two pairs of pants, five shirts, five changes of underwear and socks, two sweaters, a hoodie, a tiny laptop computer (EeePC's are awesome for travel), my iPod, two books, an extra pair of shoes (I have bad feet), a travel towel, and the usual cohort of tiny shampoo, soap, deodorant, etc. Everything fit into an REI travel backpack that will fit into the smallest overhead bin.

The only other really critical tip that isn't totally obvious is that you must carry a zippable bag for your used clothing, or you'll smell like feet after a few days. You can pick up hand-compressable space-bags at REI for $10. They're awesome -- unzip, stuff your laundry in the bag, rezip, compress, and you're ready to go. Thanks to the compression, I actually had more space in my bag at the end of each week.

Wonderful picture set, but by the the fourth slide, Heather Poole has become "Ms. Pools" and in the ninth photo drops to "Ms. Pool." Maybe the NYT needs instructions for how to proofread for 12 captions in a web browser.

I love http://www.onebag.com the site design may be a bit outdated, but e information is great. I especially recommend reading the bit on packing clothes. I always use his method of "bundle wrapping".

Three bathing suits...three nightgowns! I can pack for 10 days in a small backpack if I don't need smart clothes.

Haha so true. I spend 10 days in costa rica surfing and get by with just bringing a small back pack. Surfboards take up a bit of space tho ;)

I never considered rolling clothes instead of folding them. I guess I can imagine how it truly would limit wrinkles if they're rolled tightly enough!

My problem is shaving cream in the no liquids-gels-aerosols world. As far as I know you can't get it in a small enough package to be allowed through security.

I realise that theoretically I could buy an electric razor, though they don't work well on my beard. Alternatively I could just buy a new can of shaving cream every time I travel.

Try shaving oil. It's fantastic, and a 1.5 oz. bottle is enough for near 100 shaves.

Alternatively, a bar of shaving soap and a brush work well. More space than the oil though.

You want this: http://www.shave.com/shave/?tab=oil

Hmm, perhaps I'll try something like that. Thanks, random internet person! My beard is pretty severe though.

Mine is too - I can grow a beard as long as my hand is wide* in about 6 months. The oil is great if you have a good razor (again I recommend King of Shaves - all their stuff is so much better than Gillette rubbish) and shave every day.

Male grooming discussion on HN, who'da thunk it :-)

*This is the minimum length to join the Taliban, apparently!

Get some old style shaving soap - it is neither a liquid, nor a gel nor an aerosol and it would properly be great for your beard.

Of course then you have to get a straight razor through airport security.

If I had a thick beard, I'd just grow it. Since I don't, I don't actually need shaving cream. I gave up on shaving cream around age 17 or so and haven't looked back.

A quick search for 'travel sized shaving cream' online returns a lot of results, and at least in the NYC area I've never had trouble buying it in drugstores.

And this is news? I routinely go on 2-3 week trips with nothing but one carry on and one laptop bag.

Consider yourself lucky -- you must live in a nation that doesn't strictly enforce the "one carry-on item" rule (and yes, handbags or laptop bags count as a separate item of luggage, so the whole lot has to go in your carry on before processing through Security).

Where do you live? I just came back from a Saudi-Jordan-Canada-USA trip with a backpack and a DSLR in a separate camera pack and a bag of food as my carry-on on some very crowded and over-booked flights.

(EDIT: Backpack not Backup... damn computer terminology!!!)

Most airlines I know of allow a carry-on and one personal item (purse, laptop bag, backpack). Where do you live that you can only bring one item with you on the plane?

The UK. Where, after the liquid bombing thing, they not only brought in the 3 x 100ml of liquid rule, they insisted that passengers only carry ONE bag through security (because ramping up to actually check each bag properly was taking too long).

This isn't the airlines, it's the government. There is no work-around and it's a rule they've relaxed only at a handful of airports with additional screening equipment. Beware -- if you visit the UK, you may well only be allowed to take a single carry-on item when you fly out again!

I do not go to the UK; as a Vietnamese citizen, I need to have a "transit visa" even if I have a two-hour layover. The laws in the UK are especially ridiculous.

1 carry-on + 1 camera bag was OK at LHR, last month at least.

LHR is one of the few hubs where they installed extra securiy screening. I live in Edinburgh; EDI is still enforcing the one-bag-only rule, as are the other airports I've flown through in the past year (I avoid the British hubs wherever possible).

Grrr... I hate these slide show things. Stupid, artificial attempts at driving up pageviews.

That out of the way, I notice that conspicuously absent are electronics with their bulky chargers or other personal items that pretty much everyone needs to carry with them now.

I travel a fair amount for business (although for no longer than five or six days at a time), and this is exactly how I pack - except my bag has a fold-out section that I can put my suit jackets in so that they're only folded once.

Aside from clothing, all that I carry is a book, a laptop and charger, and a few cables (all my other electronics - BlackBerry, iPod, etc. - can either be charged off the USB port of my laptop, or I know that I won't need to recharge them).

Now, if only I could get a nice new bag that fit in the overhead compartment of a CRJ-705...

On my last trip my laptop bag contained a laptop, iPhone, iPad (which I had bought to bring back to a co-worker in Canada), Camera, two books, chargers and dongles. It was pretty ridiculous. My roll-abourd bag was also packed like the one in the link.

Truly incredible how she's able to get that much into a carry-on.

That's still way too much stuff. Maybe this is a girl thing. A man might take one suit in addition to the one he's wearing, and just a fresh shirt and underwear per day, a pair of jeans and a couple of t-shirts. Once you've done it a few times, you realize how much stuff you don't need to carry, the hotel will have it. Or you don't need a wide selection of clothes if you know what you're going to wear. If it's business, suits, if it's a vacation, no-one's going to care if you wear the same board shorts or whatever twice. Or all week, if you're going in the sea every day. Check the weather forecast before you go (and if you get it really wrong, hell, you can just buy something).

Exactly.

I don't think I need 3 pairs of shoes even when I'm at home.

I don't own 3 pairs of shoes.

I really, really don't get how people can fill up their house with shoes, or have a problem buying too many.

But then, I buy too few seeing as those I wear have a hole in the sole.

I actually own more than 3 pairs of shoes, but that has more to do with me failing to throw away the old worn-out ones.

The best trick is to constrain the size of your pack/suitcase. If you set a small limit, you don't have room to take things you don't need.

Are slideshows like that automatically generated, or does some guy sit down and copy/paste text and images into a template for each one?

If you're making that much money/impact due to the greater pageviews, you can afford the 10 minutes it takes to do the copy-and-paste donkey work.

I'm always amazed by how bad most people are at packing. I see people going to lie on a beach for a week with a suitcase big enough that they could fit in it themselves. Sometimes two.

When I was a 13 year old Cadet they told us, after every exercise make two piles, stuff you used and stuff you didn't. Aim was for the second pile to be as small as possible. Nothing teaches this as well as everything you pack, you have to carry on your back!

If I'm on a two week business trip, I'd pack for one week and just expense the hotel laundry.

> I'm always amazed by how bad most people are at packing.

It is truly extraordinary. I frequently do two week trips overseas (e.g. connecting two conferences with a weekend in the mountains) with a 30 liter backpack (no separate laptop bag). I've also done 4-day technical alpine climbs with a 26 liter pack. And somehow people need 4 times that much for a week in a different city. I blame the wheeled bags, they encourage people to bring more than they can comfortably carry and produce kinematic waves at every transition (stairs, escalators, curbs).

Yeah, wheeled luggage is a pet hate of mine. It's compounded by the people who own it usually being inexperienced travelers so they're flailing about at check-in or security on top of that.

I recently did a week dive trip, with all my gear, in a 70L kitbag. The average person coming to that resort just for the beach and the casino seemed to have at least double that!

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