{"id":5487,"date":"2013-09-02T17:04:16","date_gmt":"2013-09-02T07:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/?p=5487"},"modified":"2013-09-02T17:04:16","modified_gmt":"2013-09-02T07:04:16","slug":"travelling-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/2013\/09\/02\/travelling-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Travelling Light."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My first overseas trip is probably the best example I can give of my over-packer mentality. It was the middle of 2001, I&#8217;d only just become comfortable with the college lifestyle (for the Americans I&#8217;m referring to the 2 years prior to university) and my parents agreed to send me on a school trip to Japan something I was incredibly eager to do. Of course this being the first time they&#8217;d sent one of their children overseas my parents ensured I&#8217;d have everything I&#8217;d need whilst over there, and I really do mean everything. I managed to lug 2 giant sports bags around with me for the entire trip which contained nearly every article of clothing I owned. Whilst it was nice to not have to do laundry I think the ridicule I recieved for my rather ludicrous amount of baggage was well deserved.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/DSC_0243_1.jpg?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-5489\" alt=\"DSC_0243_1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/DSC_0243_1-600x450.jpg?resize=600%2C450&#038;ssl=1\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/DSC_0243_1.jpg?resize=600%2C450&amp;ssl=1 600w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/DSC_0243_1.jpg?resize=300%2C225&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/DSC_0243_1.jpg?resize=1200%2C900&amp;ssl=1 1200w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/DSC_0243_1.jpg?w=1960&amp;ssl=1 1960w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/DSC_0243_1.jpg?w=1336&amp;ssl=1 1336w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a>The habit didn&#8217;t die there unfortunately, managing to cement itself as something that I&#8217;d do instinctively throughout all my travels over the years. Indeed this became something of a running joke of whenever I&#8217;d go to visit friends as they&#8217;d often wonder why I was waiting for checked baggage only to break into hysterics when they sighted my brimming luggage trundle past on the carousel. When travelling overseas it was a little more defensible, although <a href=\"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/2013\/06\/03\/new-orleans-day-1\/\" target=\"_blank\">my recent visit to the USA<\/a> did have me questioning why I needed to bring along as much as I did. This, combined with my casual interest in minimization (I love things like those <a href=\"http:\/\/boingboing.net\/2012\/04\/16\/tiny-homes-by-lloyd-kahn-e.html\" target=\"_blank\">tiny, fully featured houses <\/a>people build), has led me to shed much of the cruft that I used to lug with me and I&#8217;m quite happy with the results.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll admit that the catalyst for it was my Sydney trip last week where I was only going to be staying a single night. It really didn&#8217;t make sense to check in baggage for that, even if my back pack felt a little swollen with clothes plus laptop, and the experience of getting off the plane and being able to head straight for a cab was something I felt I wanted to repeat. Thus I set about seeking out the biggest sized carry on I could find and was surprised at just how much I could get away with.<\/p>\n<p>I settled on an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.antler.co.uk\/collections\/cyberlite\/cyberlite-4-wheel-international-suitcase\" target=\"_blank\">Antler Cyberlite International Cabin Suitcase<\/a>\u00a0and to my surprise it&#8217;s plenty big enough for me to fit up to a week&#8217;s worth of clothes and other supplies, more than enough for any business trip I&#8217;ll find myself on. I was a little worried that it might be a little\u00a0<em>too<\/em> big but I had no complaints from the cabin crew this morning and indeed the amount of space in the overhead locker seemed to dwarf my supposedly huge carry on. In theory it&#8217;d be enough for pretty much anything then although I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve shaken the over-packer bug for everything just yet but at least I won&#8217;t be lugging around a massive bag for short domestic trips anymore.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure there are those out there that can take it further than I have, indeed many of the people who scoffed at my over-packing previously would routinely show up in Canberra carrying nothing more than a single backpack, however this feels like a happy medium. It still allows me to have a little fat in my packing (I&#8217;ve brought along an extra days worth of clothes in this round) whilst also giving me the advantages that I didn&#8217;t know I was missing out on before. Going any further would be quickly met with diminishing returns and I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;d end up sweating what I forgot.<\/p>\n<p>But I&#8217;m weird like that \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My first overseas trip is probably the best example I can give of my over-packer mentality. It was the middle of 2001, I&#8217;d only just&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1471],"tags":[4535,4536,2514,4537,4324],"class_list":["post-5487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-travel","tag-bags","tag-carry-on","tag-light","tag-luggage","tag-minimalism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/DSC_0243_1.jpg?fit=1960%2C1470&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppBqt-1qv","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}