Getting ready for travel

Thinking longer term than the cruise I’ll be going on in a few weeks, we like to travel light. There’s no need for me to travel light on the cruise, though of course I won’t be taking ridiculous amounts of stuff! I WAS going to say “…I won’t be going overboard” but that would be rather inappropriate seeing I’m talking about a cruise… 😉

When we travel internationally for our holidays we like to travel with hand luggage only. We have done it before for several week holidays in Europe, admittedly during summer, and it works very well. We carefully choose lightweight clothing that washes easily and dries quickly. This means we don’t have to take very much.

In booking our flights for this next trip, I have checked the hand luggage limits of all the airlines we’re going to use. Some of the airlines we’ll be using allow a maximum weight of only 5kg (about 11 lb)! Ooohhh, that’s not much!

Desperate times call for desperate measures. In the past, we’ve taken lightweight wheelie bags. When you have a bag with wheels and the armature required to support wheeling a bag, it adds quite a lot of weight.

For my domestic flights, some years ago I made a backpack to fit the size requirements of hand luggage on Australia’s airlines. It is lightweight, strong and has worked well for me. I haven’t felt that not having a wheelie bag has been a problem when I use it. It isn’t as large as I would need or could have for international travel though.

In the past my husband has not wanted to use a bag without wheels. However, this trip he has asked me to make him a backpack. So while I’m at it, I’ll make an international size one for each of us. We’ll immediately lose about 2.5kg of weight by not taking bags with wheels. As the hand luggage weight limit that we’re used to is 7kg, taking 2.5kg off that already brings us under the 5kg limit. Sweet!

So what fabric can you use for such purposes? The fabric I used for my domestic bag is just some stuff that I bought at my local fabric shop. It is somewhat water-resistant, and strong. But I’m not going to use it for these new bags. For the new ones, I’m planning to use dyneema for the girls’ bags, and ballistic nylon for our bags.

Dyneema is extremely lightweight, has a waterproof coating, and is VERY strong. I’ve ordered some from a hiking website in the US. Because it is so lightweight, it will mean the girls have to carry even less bag weight. And as they’re not adults, we don’t want to weigh them down too much! The downside of dyneema is that it is floppy and the bag will have no structure. But given that the girls won’t actually have a heap of stuff to carry, we figure it should work ok. I estimate that the weight of the girls’ bags will be about 400 grams (about 14 oz).

Ballistic nylon, which we’re using for our bags, is an extremely strong, water-resistant (when coated, as ours will be), durable fabric that I believe was first developed for bullet-proof vests. It is heavier than the dyneema, but we’re going to use it for our bags in case we ever need to check one in. A dyneema bag would not hold up to the rigours of being thrown around by baggage handlers and chucked in a plane hold. A ballistic nylon bag will. And, happily, it will hold its shape much better than the dyneema will. I’ve ordered the ballistic nylon from another supplier in the US, one that does outdoor supplies. I estimate the weight of our bags will be about 800 grams (28 oz or 1 3/4 lb).

Hopefully once I’ve come home from my cruise, the fabrics will be waiting here for me to make our new bags. While these fabrics are expensive, because they are such highly specialised fabrics, making the bags will be much cheaper than purchasing something that fits our requirements! We can definitely make a 5kg luggage limit work – for me, this is just another problem solving exercise, and one that can be done!