Whatchyagotinyerbackpackthere? | Try, Fail, Grow, Repeat

Now let’s answer one of my favorite questions about our round-the-world trip:

What are you bringing with you?

Or when asked of my wife by her friends:

What are you bringing for shoes?

The short answer: as little crap as possible. I’m not a fan of stuff, and I’m even less of a fan of dragging stuff with me when I travel.

So I assume I’m going to be a Grade-A hater when it comes to dragging a bunch of junk on the longest trip we’ve ever taken through more airports, train stations, and bus terminals than we can imagine.

So, yes, we’re trying to pack as light as possible. The first time I did a test pack of all the things I would be putting in my backpack (just me, mind you, this didn’t include my wife or our son) it looked like this:

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Everything weighed about 15 pounds. Bingo. Loved it.

I haven’t owned a backpack since my last trip to Europe in 1996, so one of the items on our Todo List was to lay everything out, figure out how much space we needed, and head to REI and buy some sparkly new backpacks.

In practice it was much more complicated. I figured the most accurate way to determine the size of the packs we would need would be to bring all of our stuff to the store and try jamming it in various backpacks.

When I explained this idea to my wife she didn’t actually say “You’re an idiot,” she just gave me that subtle eyebrow raise that screams, “I think you’re an idiot, but I love you and don’t want to hurt your feelings, so I’m not going to say anything. But just know you’re an idiot.”

So one bright afternoon in late May we crammed everything we thought we would be bringing on our trip into a single huge rolling suitcase and dragged it to REI with our 4-year-old in tow. We rolled over to the wall of backpacks, selected a few that we had researched previously, unzipped the suitcase, and commenced flinging clothes back and forth.

Braeden quickly decided he was hungry. And tired. And that he didn’t want the lunch that we brought for him. And that the store was too quiet and needed to be livened up a bit with the screams of a toddler yelling “I DON’T WANT THAT CHICKEN!” at the top of his lungs.

A store associate poked his head into the aisle in which we had parked ourselves and stared at the two harried adults squatting with the screaming boy, the huge open suitcase, several assorted backpacks, underwear, socks, shorts, and flip-flops strewn everywhere on the floor. He decided that now would be a good time for a lunch break and fled. Coward.

Several customers that might have been interested in buying a backpack that day wandered into our aisle and quickly thought better of it: “REI’s open every day. We’ll come back when there isn’t a homeless family setting up camp in aisle 7.”

After an hour or so of shuffling clothes back and forth we wearily took our three chosen backpacks, our huge suitcase, and the teary-eyed-but-now-smiling-because-he-finally-decided-that-he-did-want-the-goddamned-chicken-after-all toddler up to the counter to settle up.

The winning packs were all Ospreys, a brand which all reviews seemed to indicate that they were made by the hardened hands of knitting, stitching gods:

Ozone 46L – For me. I had dreams of buying a 30L pack, but doing laundry every three days or smelling like I had been riding in a boxcar for a week turned out to be a nonstarter, so I went bigger. I’ve already taken the pack on a trip to visit family in Georgia and so far I love it.
Ozone 35L – For Braeden’s stuff, which I’ll carry on my chest when in transit. We could have gone with a single 65L pack for both my and his things, but in the end we decided it was preferable to carry on two packs rather than check a single, bigger pack. Plus the boy is absolutely over the moon and bursting with pride about his “big boy backpack”. And I look like a real backpacker wearing both packs at once. Either that or a complete dipshit. I haven’t decided yet.
Meridian 60L – For Juliann’s stuff. It’s a hybrid pack that is wearable but also sports wheels and a handle, like conventional rolling luggage. We’re planning on lots of “slow travel”, and we’re not going to be picking up and changing locations every few days like traditional backpackers, so a larger pack with wheels is a nice upgrade for her. We can heft it if necessary, but most of the time she’ll be able to pull it. We could have sprung for options like a 4WD transmission and cup holders but come on, we’re simple folk.

So now we have our packs and we have our stuff, the entirety of which is below. Deciding what to bring on a 15-month first leg is no minor feat, and we’ve probably made quite a few mistakes, but we’ll fix them as we go.

If there was a question of whether we would use something immediately or in a few months, we left it off the list. We can always pick things up on the road. Looking for Q-tips in Cambodia is going to be part of the adventure.

9 days until departure!

My Clothes