Just a post for posterity’s sake, blogged from Vancouver. I haven’t quite made it home yet.
This has been the busiest two months in the history of my consultancy practice, travel wise. For the last month, I have been living out of a suitcase, with my schedule consisting of a week on the road and one or two days at home for four weeks in a row. My home has been an Eagle Creek Switchback Max 25 (which is an incredibly excellent bag, if I do say so myself), and it’s full of everything I need for my travelling facilitation and harvesting roadshow, including:
- Two pairs of “good” pants and a pair of jeans.
- Two “good” shirts and two t-shirts.
- Swim trunks/shorts, taekwondo pants and taekwondo shoes.
- Five pairs of socks
- Four 75g Higgins Brothers juggling balls
- A modified Generation tin whistle in D
- A box of Charters markers and some assorted Mr. Sketch pens
- 3 sets of Staetdler pens: 8 triplus fineliners, 20 triplus fineliners and 20 triplus colour
- Two Moleskines – a new one and an old one
- A copy of Stephen Karcher’s I Ching and my current read, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (which I bought…)
- A deck of playing cards
- My laptop, cellphone, Canon Powershot A720, Olympus DS-2 voice recorder, Sansa 2GB mp3 player and an assortment of cables, connectors and a webcam.
- A plastic Nalgene water bottle (soon to be replaced by metal)
- A steel travel mug from Bad Ass Coffee in Maui.
- A tiny single steel travel espresso cup that always elicits “ahhhhhh…cuuuuute” comments from Asian baristas at airport espresso bars (it’s a phenomenon…)
- Glasses, toiletries, tea bags, wallet, passport, a file folder with border documentation and some ball point pens.
The whole thing is pretty manageable, and contains everything I need to work, exercise, play and amuse myself on long flights. It all goes on my back when I am walking between the ferry and my home, which is a mile through forest and along rural roads, and it all rolls nicely along airport and hotel floors. I have literally been living out of this bag for a month, at home and on the road, (with the exception of the three days the bag was in Korea) only changing around the clothes when I get home, switching dirty for clean. All told, a tidy little set up, and a nice reminder of how little I actually need to work and live with.