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       Packing for Travel

Light packing is the key to an enjoyable vacation, and a prime example of the need for careful preparations in advance of your departure. Need help on waht to bring for your trips. Click here for a packing list. Except on a cruise (which involves other considerations), pack light! Take no more than one medium-sized suitcase per person, partially empty, and you assure the success of your trip. Take more, and you become a fatigued beast of burden, a prisoner of porters and taxicabs, the unhappy bearer of unwashed clothing or of items never used.

Come to peace with yourself. Realize that you will not in all probability be invited to a garden party or to the opera on your trip, or even to meet the Queen, and that it is not necessary to include an outfit for every conceivable and far-fetched occasion. Nor is it necessary to bring pharmaceuticals, Kleenex, band-aids; the entire world has become well-developed, and even Kathmandhu has a 24-hour drugstore.

About the only paraphernalia you will ever need to bring on a trip--items that perhaps can’t easily be obtained once there (although they’re really available everywhere)--are transformers for your electrical devices (like hair dryers) or adapters for foreign sockets, or perhaps coffee immersion heaters.

A light suitcase means freedom. To emerge from a train or plane with bundles and boxes in every hand, means porters, means taxicabs, means that the first hotel you pass must be the hotel in which you'll stay. To jaunt along with a light suitcase is to avoid all these costs, to use buses instead of cabs, to make your hotel choice slowly, carefully, and without desperation. With all the decrease in fatigue which a light load entails, you can simply walk out when the man at the hotel counter quotes too high a price--and seek another hotel.

Don't sneer at this freedom. The travelers whose arms are bursting from their sockets with weight, become prisoners. It costs them dollars simply to get from train to hotel; it costs them tiring effort to shop around and to choose.

A light suitcase means spiritual freedom, too, and an ability to concentrate on the attractions and activities of your destination, in preference to mundane, daily needs. With too many clothes, and too many parcels, you'll spend hours unpacking and arranging your apparel when you check into a hotel. You'll spend hours packing them away again as you prepare to leave. You'll awake on the morning of departure, spend frantic and precious time in packing and wrapping, and finally collapse in sweat on your outgoing plane or train. Moreover, you'll have a disorderly, bursting suitcase--cluttered with dirty and unwashed clothes--in which to search for items on the trip itself.

Remember, too, that these problems increase as the trip continues. However heavy your suitcase may have been as you left home, it'll be twice as heavy as you go along. At every stop of your trip, you'll pick up mementos, gifts, books, papers, tapes, souvenirs. Unless you've had a one-third-empty suitcase to begin with, you'll be festooned with extra parcels and packages near the end. You'll loop them over your shoulder, you'll squeeze them under your arm, you'll carry some with your little finger--and you'll approach each new city and each new hotel search in a mood of desperation. The first hotel you examine will have you at their mercy.

If you make the right decisions when you pack in preparation for travel, you’ll first buy the lightest suitcase available. You'll then fill it with the skimpiest set of clothing your courage will allow. Having done that, you'll then remove half these clothes from the suitcase, and depart on your trip. You won't, for instance, take eight complete changes of underwear. You'll realize that three are enough; that there are few less-than-a-week laundries at your destination, and that you'll have to wash out those t-shirts yourself, in any event. You'll recognize how depressing it is to cart a suitcase of dirty clothes from city to city.