In the four years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic that started in early 2020 I traveled to 19 countries and all over America, racking up nearly 200,000 miles in the air and countless more from road trips.  While I now consider myself somewhat of a minimalist traveler, almost exclusively with a carry-on bag, I still manage to pack a fair amount of bits and bobs in.  A future article will come about my bags of choice, for now the focus is on things that have proven to be extremely helpful and not what if items.

The more I travel, the lighter my bag gets and the days of what if and maybe I’ll need are basically gone.  Now I can fit everything I need into a 50L Marmot Duffel for trips around a week, and have never had an issue using it as a carry-on. Longer trips or ones where I won’t have access to doing laundry I’ll use a Deuter 65L Travel Backpack that can easily be checked. I’m still a late packer, often doing it just hours before leaving and never using a list.  This leads to the first of my issues, and fortunately the one that brings me the least pain.

On my recent trip to Iceland I went laptop free, which meant I’d have no way to dump images as memory cards filled up.  Having  128GB card and two 64GB cards might sound like enough, but as previously mentioned my anticipation was some long time-lapse setups through the 18+ hours of darkness.  This meant adding more storage in the form of memory cards.