Travel Lite

A trip starts the moment you have the idea for it, and finishes the moment it disappears forever from your memory. Traveling is exciting because you are pitting yourself against new experience, and long after you return the positive benefits should remain with you even if one day you forget how you achieved that benefit. One of the worst parts of traveling is the preparation, not always what you have to do but what you have to suffer in terms of what the other people you travel with want in terms of organisation, not forgetting the extra pressure you put on them with your own desires.

Ania gets to go on many trips throughout the year, as do many people from her department, as they attend exams and give courses in Poland and abroad. Often, while she has little more than a small roll-along backpack, her friends have small wardrobes designed to deal with the 'clothes for travelling' plus 'clothes for wearing around the hotel' and 'clothes for the exam', or possibly even 'clothes for dinner'. Yes, it's nice to have all those clothes, except that they have to be transported on and off trains, planes, cars and elevators, dragged up and down stairs, and eventually unpacked. This not only effects oneself, it is also effects everyone around, who have to suffer by helping to lift the bags, to have less room on the train and then finally have to wait in the lobby while a certain person unpacks, changes clothes and messes around with their make up. No, let's instead think of our friends and take less of the stuff that does nothing but prop up our own egos.
To respond quickly to the experiences that travel offers, one has to be able to move quickly. The more we take, the longer it will take us to meet those changing circumstances. "Sorry, I cannot join you, I have to wash my hair," is an at-home thought, one we need to abandon. My wife gets to see more, do more and meet more people because her hair is not cut in a way that needs continual maintenance, and with the bare minimum she takes in her bag she spends longer exploring her new room than she does in unpacking. She is down having a coffee at the bar or in that cafe across the road while her friends are still placing endless bottles on the shelf above their sink in an effort to recreate home in a hotel.

When you pack your bag, question everything:

• Why am I taking it?
• Can something else do the same job?
• Is it light enough?

The chances are that if it is liquid or cream the container is too large, something else will do, and your body can survive a day or two without it, and unless you are going to be staying in a field there will be some equivalent product on sale when you get there if it becomes vital to your continuing existence. Taking too much also means that everything gets squashed, so now we have to do something about all those creased clothes when we arrive. The less you take has another advantage, we now have less to lose if we drop something, leave it behind or have it stolen.

Do you need that fancy bag for your showering things, another for your make up, one more for first aid things and so on? Who will see what you bring? Are you afraid of the maid's opinion? Your friend who already knows you? If it fails to all fit in one wash bag, then there we have too much stuff. While choosing that one, effective washbag, find one with a nice hook on so you can hang it somewhere that doesn't have a shelf.

For the clothes, flexibility in choice is best done with the small things rather than the large. A single jacket and trousers can be mixed with a number of tops, and they take less room, and even if no one else notices, at least we will feel good for a change. Of course, it goes without saying that everything we take should be mix and match. If we think that we might like to buy things on our trip, and we do not want to have to stagger back with a bursting bag, then taking clothes bought from a secondhand and abandoning them before returning could make a lot of sense. Ania was once unexpectedly given many books on one trip to Slovenia, which since she had to bring them back it made sense to abandon other things to compensate. It was on this trip that she saw her first ever luggage on wheels.

And when we get back home, we unpack only what we need to wash or the bits and pieces that we bought while travelling. For the rest, since we will need most for the next trip it makes sense to store it in the luggage. This saves significant amounts of time during that stressful preparation process, and makes it easier to decide early on what you are short of and need to replace. And when we are doing our normal shopping, we try and remember to look out for those things we need, because trips are fun and worth good preparation.