Essentials

I’m not a great one for surprises.  The build up and preparation is all part of the fun, I think and having everything sorted and organised is key to my being relaxed enough to sit back and enjoy the whole affair.  One of my methods when travelling is to keep small essentials together in bags, some of which I don’t unpack but use at home to corral all of those little bits and pieces.

Those freeby bags which come with make up offers come in handy, as do the in-flight amenity bags which I can never bear to throw away (and I’ll bet never get recycled).  But I’m not talking cosmetics and make up here.

Of course not!  The essentials I’m thinking about this morning are all of the electronic bits and pieces which have become part of the current travellers’ kit.  With a bag of tricks such as this, we hope we have everything we need to stay connected, record the experience and entertain ourselves whilst in the air, on the road and most probably, whilst waiting.  Thing is, after a few months of simply throwing things into the bag, I suspected there were things in there which were surplus to requirements.

It was time for a cull.

The only things I could find to take out were two memory cards for the camera I no longer use – actually, the last but two cameras ago. 

Well, taking those out is going to make a huge difference in the weight of my bag, isn’t it?   At least the remaining USB memory sticks, spare plugs and cables don’t weigh a great deal.

I’m all in favour of small actions by manufacturers to streamline the design of their products, too – well done Samsung for this little spacesaving device.

At least my decision to take just one camera means I have only one battery charger to carry, together with a couple of spare batteries.

And since we bought one of these (actually, two of these, a European one and a US version) we no longer have to take a whole bag of plug adapters to charge all our stuff.  Highly recommend!

I don’t want to have all of that stuff in my carry on bag though, so I have a second, smaller bag for my phone and tablet things.  Earphones, charging cables and a couple of spare SD cards in a case fit nicely into the smallest of roll up bags and squeeze into my handbag neatly.

The little blue rollup bag replaces the small brown one, because, these days, I don’t use any “i-thing” regularly, so there’s another small space-saver.

Just as well, perhaps, because though we have considered leaving our baby laptop at home and relying totally on our tablets, I have not quite made the transition yet.  Managing photos, blogging and so on is just so much easier and trouble free so the lightweight laptop continues to be part of our kit and thankfully, I have a hero to carry it for me

That just leaves my new Kindle Voyage, slightly lighter and smaller than my old, original Kindle, to put in my handbag and since it uses the same micro USB connector as my phone and tablet, hoooray!  No additional charger and plug!

Does that make for a net weight saving on the essentials this time then?

Possibly.  Except we have just added a small 1Tb portable hard drive to our kit.  After all, I can’t run the risk of losing all my photos, can I? 

Maybe there are savings to be made in the art kit?

Comments

[Lesley]

...and I think that I've got it hard to have all The Dog's kit plus my kit for walking The Dog. When we travel He has the box on top of the car roof for His stuff with His on journey food & water suplies handy in the boot. Oh! and by the way, He has 80% of the back seat on which to travel.