10/ 24/ 2016

Packing with Ease

This year, I’ve been traveling more often. I love seeing new places and exploring unfamiliar cities. The thing is, I hate flying and packing. But I don’t let that stop me! Over the past several months, I’ve incorporated a few tricks that make the process less stressful.

Find the right bag for you. I don’t check bags when I fly. It gives me major anxiety (because I’m a control freak!). There are hundreds of carry on bags for a reason—we all like different features, textures, shapes and sizes. When selecting my newest one, I thought about all the things I liked about my current carry on. Then I consider the one thing it didn’t have that would make my life easier, which was to have a pocket I could store my laptop in on the outside of the bag.

I settled on this Delsey rolling suitcase. I was drawn to it’s light weight material, design and outer zipper compartment for device storage. Not to mention I bought mine for under $100 on eBags—a major, budget friendly bonus!

Here’s the bag in action

On this particular trip, I didn’t take my laptop. But here’s the pocket it goes inside.

Get a durable, reusable bag. I didn’t realize I needed this tool until I got a free one at a conference last year. The Zizzu Bee Bag is a polyester reusable bag that is excellent for holding my smaller things I keep in my tote bag (like my keys, cell phone charger, snacks and medications). I’m now able to find those items quickly and can reuse the bag for years instead of having to use multiple plastic bags over time.

Hop on the packing cube train. I was very skeptical of packing cubes. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good organizational tool, but I didn’t understand how they could make that big of a difference. I was so wrong!

I ordered a less expensive set on Amazon by Mossio. I put all my tops in one, my bottoms in another, my personals in a smaller cube and my boots in a shoe bag. They each stacked nicely into my carry on. The best part was avoiding the frustration of not having to dig through the entire bag to find the one item I was looking to wear. This Mossio set also came with laundry bags, which was a nice bonus.

A flat packing toiletry bag. I hated having all of my toiletries in small separate bags. But the organizers I found were too bulky for carry on bags. That is until I found this toiletry kit from eBags. I highly recommend checking out the site for a video demonstration of the bag. It really is large enough to fit all my things!