This will be the last post on this blog for a short while. For reasons I will not go into I am obliged to spend a week out of the country so will be taking a short holiday.
One of the great things about having a partner who is both intelligent and practical is that I can confidently leave important arrangements to her without any worries. She organised the flight leaving me to simply pack my own bag.
My first thought was to locate my holiday rucksack. This is a fine item with six large external pockets covering three sides. It is the sort of rucksack that converts into a suitcase with the harness covered so that it does not catch up in airport luggage conveyers. Clothing packs into it nicely and the pockets allow me to locate items in a moment. For such a short duration trip this bag has ample capacity so I offered to carry stuff for my girlfriend and her son too.
Things now get interesting. The flight has been booked with a certain budget company and one of their idiosyncrasies is that passengers only get cabin luggage in the price. Hold items require a hefty additional charge. Cabin bags above a certain size also incur an additional charge.
This has made me think good and hard about what I will actually take with me. Everything must fit in a smaller “cabin legal” bag. Usually I would comply with security restrictions by putting my penknife in my hold bag. No hold bag means I cannot take along this most useful of implements. The haemostats that I keep in my medical kit have also been put aside.
This is proving to be an interesting exercise. Future blogs will cover what I decided to take, what I decided not to take, and how things worked out.