reesesWeb

This post was inspired by the most recent "this is how you should live your life" posts on 43folders. I blogbarfed a way-too-long comment that was in poor etiquette, and decided to edit it down into two related posts here. I'll add to it as I remember more things, and I'll add photos the next time I have to pack for travel.

Just like any moving part, the collection of things I carry from place to place is scrutinized repeatedly for ways to reduce weight. An obvious decision, I've separated my car keys from my house keys so I don't have to carry the big plastic lump with me since there's zero chance that I'll be using it.

As you can tell from the title of this post, this entry will focus on work-related travel. Travelling for work is quite a bit more difficult than travelling for play for a number of reasons.

Clothing

If you're traveling for work, you probably have at least an informal dress code. You may not need a suit and tie, but you're not going to show up in jeans and motorhead t-shirts either. At a minimum, you can probably get by with khakis and the consultant-blue "wrinkle-resistant" shirts, but you'll more likely wear wool slacks, dark socks, black shoes and belt, and long-sleeved, button-up shirts. I'm writing this from the male perspective, obviously, as that's what I have been for the past several years.

First and foremost, you'll want to optimize your wardrobe (or this part of your wardrobe) for this type of travel. Find a pair of pants that fit comfortably, and buy as many as you can stand to buy before it seems ridiculous. Buy them in one color, or many, but get them in dark, neutral colors like black, charcoal, and maybe grey. No one notices your pants unless there's something wrong, and quite often, you may end up having to wear the same pair twice on a visit. Dark colors are less noticeable, they're slimming, and wool can absorb just about any gunk without looking nasty. Plus, it's easier to do the "salesman's iron" trick of hanging wool in the bathroom while the shower is on full-steam.

The same goes for socks -- find a pair you like, and buy 10 pairs in the same color. When they start to discolor, or get nasty, start throwing them away with extreme prejudice. If you can throw them away on the road, that's extra good -- it's less to pack and carry back. When you get down to one week's worth, wash them, donate them to goodwill, and buy another 10 pairs. Even if you buy the same type of sock in the same color from the same maker, don't overlap "generations". You'll end up dressing in the dark and not noticing that your socks don't really match -- you'll have a faded "blue" sock and a new "so navy it's black" sock making a pair.

It's not the best for the shoes, but if you're taking short trips, just take one pair of shoes. It'll shorten their life, but if you trade off pairs every week, and keep them on cedar shoe trees while they're off-duty, you'll squeak out an extra year or so. Bruno Magli makes some casual shoes with no metal and a rubber/plastic heel less than 1" high, so those are a way to avoid having to take off your shoes in the decreasing number of airports that don't have mandatory removal regulations.

Learn your sizes, and not just your neck measurement, chest width, arm length, waist size, and inseam. You'll run up against some situation (an extended stay, not making it to the dry cleaners on time, whatever) that requires you to buy an essential piece of clothing on site, and you don't want to be pulling the fabric under your arms all day. Pick a couple chains (Banana Republic and Brooks Brothers can be lifesavers, and there's one in just about every city) and figure out your size in a shirt and pant style that you don't detest. Feel free to buy all the pants at either of these places -- they'll all look fine, and you're going to be rough on them, so you might as well save the $500 pants for when you're going out on the town at home.

Underwear is a personal choice. I've finally (after 20-teen-something years) realized that "boxer briefs" kick all ass. The best I've found are from ex officio, and available at REI. I love the advertising on the packaging -- they claim you could go for weeks with just one pair, hand-washing them in the hotel room sink every night, and I believe it. This absolutely disgusts my wife, which is like a special discount that doesn't save me any money.

Speaking of hand-washing in the bathroom, I only have one tip. The things you can wash (socks and underwear, basically) are fairly durable, and can be dried more quickly by hand-squeezing the excess water out first, then lying the item flat in a towel. Roll the towel up, grab the ends of the roll, and twist your little heart out. Unroll the towel, and hang up the now-damp clothes to finish drying.

I'm a pajama guy, and I can't really get around that. However, I've learned to do without heavy flannel, which takes up a lot of space. Patagonia's Capilene line packs incredibly tightly, and a shirt and a pair of long-underwear-style pants work very well. They're also very room-washable when you need to do so.

Here's probably my biggest secret about managing clothing while traveling: if I regularly travel to the same place, I cache clothing in the client's city. Many hotels (especially higher end hotels, such as Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons, and Park Hyatts) will allow regular customers to keep a bag on site. This "service" can range from letting me keep a piece of luggage in a back room to giving me a locker, into which only my clothing will go. This can easily be combined with dry cleaning, so I can drop off my dirty clothes (except for socks, pajamas, and underwear, which I have prefer not to leave in the care of strangers with blacklights, which is why I love microfibre for these items) when I check out, and pick up clean clothes when I check back in next visit.

If your hotel doesn't offer this type of service, if you travel often but not often enough, or if you plan on staying wherever is least expensive (go hotwire!), you still have the same option, just with a little extra work. Almost every dry cleaner will hold clothes for thirty days after you drop them off. This is probably due to some regulation, but all of the claim tickets I've read have said,"Not responsible for items left over thirty days." A shirt on a hanger costs about $1.50 to launder and press, and pants cost $5 or so to dry clean and press. This is one of those situations where it's so cost-effective to let someone else do it that you shouldn't be washing your clothes at home, packing them, carrying them to the car and to the airport, unpacking them and noticing the prominent wrinkle right across the middle of the chest of your shirt. $1.50 to save yourself all that time, and almost a pound of weight carried on your shoulder.

Yeah, your shoulder. If you don't need to carry anything but four pairs of underwear and socks, and a pair of super-foldable pajamas, you're going to shove that in an Eagle Creek Pack-It Compressor, push all the air out, and throw it in your slightly-larger-than-normal laptop bag.

Screw rolling bags. I foolishly bought a roll-aboard from Tumi based on the salesman's assurance that it adhered to all of the carry-on requirements, only to find out that extreme force was required to get it to fit in the overhead bin of any Boeing plane. If you need a roll-aboard, do your research about specific models, make sure they are no longer on any axis than the shortest airline requirement in that axis, and favor fewer, large pockets over more, small pockets. You can make your own packaging with the Compressors mentioned above and the Pack-It system, available on the same site.

Electronics and work gear

Converge as much as possible. I hate the Treo, but a combination phone/PDA is a great space saver if you're going to be carrying both of them anyway, and it's a better PDA due to its connectedness than most options anyway. With an SD card or two and some planning, you can easily carry 2-4 gigabytes in any pocket you think is already full. For $10 or so, you can buy an adapter to convert the tiny 2.5mm headphone output on the Treo to the more conventional 1/8" size that most portable headphones expect.

Speaking of headphones, this brings us to one of the more important topics. Anything with cords will break with repeated use. It's plastic wrapped around metal (and sometimes another layer of shielding metal), and bending and unbending it in various directions several times a week will result in accelerated wear. Figure that, unless you baby it (and occasionally irritate other people trying to get off the plane while you're repacking your earphones), you're going to go through anything corded and mobile once a year. If you don't like the idea of buying $500 Shure E5Cs once a year, leave them at home and buy a pair of E2Cs or E3Cs for $80-150, which is only about $7-13/month. When you're on a plane, there's so much ambient noise anyway that the attenuation given by the more expensive in-ear earphones won't make much difference. You're not going to have an audiophile experience at 35,000 feet. That doesn't mean the crappy iPod earbuds are OK, though. Throw those things out right now.

The cord issue goes for the clever retracting usb-to-everything chargers and ethernet cables as well. Once a year, the cord will short, the spring will break, or one of the plugs will just stop conducting. Don't sweat it, but don't spend so much on these things that you'll be upset at having to replace them either.

Don't buy a 17" laptop. Just don't do it. If you're buying a Mac, the 15" PowerBook/MacBook Pro is what you're going to buy. If you're buying a PC, I would have directed you to buy a T-series Thinkpad, but Lenovo is doing a fabulous job of screwing up the brand (look at the X-60 for harbingers of things to come). If you can stomach it, look at Dell's smaller laptops, but I'm thinking the Panasonic ultra-minis are very attractive right now.

Bathroom goods

I have a few requirements, such as shampoo, conditioner, soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant, q-tips, flossing sticks, razor, shaving cream or gel, and nose strips. I try to pick the type of thing that I can buy in any Target or CVS/Walgreen's/Rite-Aid/etc., and I try to buy the smallest unit available for sale. This is wasteful, but this stuff leaks, they all come in awkwardly-sized plastic vessels, and are not easy to pack compactly. Better to spend $15/week on this stuff than to have a mess all over your laptop.

Client storage

If you have a desk at a client to whom you travel on a regular basis, take advantage of it. Buy the big can of gel, store cold-weather wear, overshoes, whatever, in your desk drawer. This is like gold, because it solves so many of your problems. Buy an extra laptop power adapter, and only carry one between the office and your hotel, not between home and work. Pack everything cleanly in a backpack or sports bag, so you can easily ship it (yes, ship it) home when your engagement is over (or looks to be about over).

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