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Tips for Packing Light and Dressing Well

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    I could use some help if anyone has any suggestions. I have a 18-day trip to various parts of Europe coming up and I'm already dreading the packing. I'll need to dress in business formal attire at least once on most days, but still have enough room for the usual traveler gear (camera, smart/casual clotes, books). Usually, whenever I pack for a trip half of this length, it feels like I'm carrying too much. But, now with an even longer trip on my horizon, I'm thinking that I need to change my approach. Please let me know if you have any life-saving packing tips that you can offer! Thanks.

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    The trick is to have your laundry done every four or five days and to only bring one suit. I know that might sound like a bad idea, but that's how one packs light.

    Hopefully most of your meetings aren't with the same people every day, so it's likely no one will notice. Do your best to keep your suit clean and have it dry cleaned whenever necessary. Pants tend to take up a lot of room when you have a lot of them, so do your best to only pack a few and repeat them much as possible. It's always better to underpack than overpack. Worst case scenario is you can purchase what you forgot or thought you didn't need.

    Another great tip is those travel vacuum bags that you can find at most discount stores. They suck all of the air out of your clothes and compress them down to practically nothing. Unfortunately, they make your clothing very wrinkled, so be sure you have access to an iron at your hotel.

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    I hate the vacuum bags for dress items because of the wrinkles. I've had more success by rolling my clothes as if they were going into a tube. For some reason that seems to save space. Although, I haven't figured out why that is. Maybe it just helps fill out the corners of the suitcase better.

    Another good tip is to wear your sport coat on the plane on top of a casual outfit. It's a better look for getting upgrades.

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    You should tell us first where you go and when ... it's not the same to give ideas for Spain in summer than for Finland in winter .....

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    I love the eBags Packing Cubes. I find that they do a great job at letting you pack a lot of clothes and keep them in wearable condition. You can buy a 3-piece set for around $25 either directly from their site, or from Amazon.

    They are just thin suitcases that fit inside of your normal suitcase, but they help you compress and organize your clothes without wrinkling them like the vacuum packs do. Once all of your clothes are in place you'll have plenty of extra room in your suitcase for raincoats or shoes, etc.

    They also have small handles so if you really want to pack light or take them as a carry on, you don't even need a suitcase. They are also very appealing and smart looking. I highly recommend them.

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    Whatever you end up doing, you should only checking one bag. Not only will you be traveling lighter, but you'll avoid the new surcharges on checking more than one bag that many airlines are now charging to offset the higher fuel costs.

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    I usually travel with too many books, so my recent acquisition of a Kindle really lightened the load.

    Unfortunately, there aren't a wide variety of books available yet, but I still manage. Additionally, you can read newspapers (like the Wall Street Journal) and a few magazines. You can send your own documents to it, so it's good for reading work reports, etc.

    It's a bit of a burden in that it's just another device you need to charge, but the battery life is long.

    It's perfect for reading in long, slow moving security lines -- much less cumbersome than a book.

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    My wife and I will be leaving on a trip to Europe next week and we will be in France and Portugal for a total of twenty-two days. My wife is not a big believer in "packing light" since she'd like to be able to wear something different in each of the various places we'll be travelling to. (She also likes me to follow her lead in this regard.) Considering the length of the trip, that adds up to a lot of luggage. However, over the years, we've planned some of our vacations in such a way that we can pack relatively lightly for at least a portion of our travels. For example, this trip, we are going to be flying directly to Paris and checking in at the Hotel Meurice. After staying at the Meurice for the better part of a week, we will check out. However, we will be leaving a good deal of our baggage at the Meurice and taking less than half of our clothes with us for a week-long barge trip down the French canal system, through the Burgundy region. We then will return to the Meurice for a few more wonderful days in Paris, at which time we will simply reclaim the bags that we had left behind. Then, we'll continue on to Lisbon for the remainder of our trip.

    There is no way that we would be able to accomodate all of our clothing and other items in the relatively small confines of the stateroom that we have on the barge. But, using this approach and returning to the same hotel after a portion of our journey is over provides us with the much-appreciated opportunity to lighten our load during that time and still be able to have access to the more formal attire that we would want to have at our disposal later on, when we are in Lisbon!

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    NPR had a segment on "How to Pack Everything You Own in One Bag" a few days ago. Read the article on their website and you'll see that rolling clothes, as resilin suggests, is not the most efficient way to use space in a suitcase. It turns out that "bundle wrapping" your clothes into small packages, where some clothes wrap around other clothing, is the most efficient approach that doesn't wrinkle your clothes. See the diagram in the article for an example of bundle wrapping. I think I'll have to give it a try!

    OneBag.com, which was mentioned in the segment, is a very popular site dedicated to the 'art and science of travelling light.' Not only does OneBag cover the ins and outs of bundle wrapping, it also goes into the finer details of sticking to a list that doesn't include packing things that you might need on your trip.

    See for yourself. http://onebag.com

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