Escape from the suitcase without a handle – 09/08/2023 – Josimar Melo

The frequent traveler already knows: one of the biggest perrengues of the trip is the inevitable coexistence with the airport. When there’s a stopover then… it’s an ordeal on departure, on stopover, on arrival.

For me, one of the ways to circumvent, or alleviate, inconvenience is to reduce the baggage.

Journalistic writing manuals teach that less is more — the more concise the text, the better: the same goes for your suitcase. I try to reduce it to a carry-on bag, to take on the plane.

There is an inconvenience: if you have one or more stopovers, you will have to lug that suitcase between flights. But other than that… the rest is just joy.

I think there’s a limit to how many travel days you can cram into a single suitcase. In my case, for short trips, less than a week, it gets easier. But there are those who manage to travel a month (or more!) without bags to check in. If they are adventurers who will pass through many airports, this can be a blessing. If you want to know how to do it, and love single-minded fanatics (and with a theme as unsexy as this one), seek out the Reddit community called… onebag, of course.

Less centered, I just want the practicality of avoiding extra doses of tiredness and stress at the airport. So I stick to a few rules.

I haven’t reached the perfection of chef Ferran Adrià yet. We once went from Lima to New York together. He had already been in Peru for a few days, coming from Spain, and we were going to stay in New York for a while. I was surprised when, at the airport, I saw that he hadn’t checked in any luggage and had only a small suitcase with him.

His secret: for seven days he wore the same jacket and shoes. And in the suitcase there were only a pair of pants and underwear: at the hotel, each night he put the clothes on his back to be washed, used the ones that were clean, and the next day he repeated the ritual.

Since I wear similar clothes, I could even do something like that —if it weren’t for the price (which I checked the next day) for hotel laundries.

With that option eliminated for financial reasons, I went back to my rule of thumb: pack less than you think you’ll need. To this day, no matter how frugal I am, I always come back with clothes I haven’t worn. So trust me: you’ll use less — so take less. In the cold, you can change the sweaty shirt, but the shirt… you can wear it again. You don’t need one a day.

Detail: I use a suitcase with that extendable zipper, which allows, if necessary, to increase its space on the way back. The problem is using the extra space to bring bottles… then you really have to ship them, with very few exceptions (such as Mendoza airport).

Okay, you managed not to waste time in queues to check in your luggage or at the baggage carousels. This gives you more time to spend at the airport — tormented in that environment of stressed zombies. Okay, if you travel once a year, you might be curious: in the past, a neophyte traveller, I’ve already been enchanted by the shops, by the different languages ​​resonating, by ordering beer in another language.

But today, on short trips, with work waiting for me at the end of the line, I’ve stretched my patience. And considering I’ll be lugging my suitcase through the halls, this wait time is even less appealing.

To alleviate this, a trick is to try to concentrate your air mileage on a single company: with this, gaining a higher status in the points program, even traveling in economy class you will be able to have facilities, such as using VIP rooms or facing fewer queues for boarding, mitigating waiting times.

I repeat that, on an eventual trip, all the perrengues can seem like an adventure. Repeating these routines several times a year is not: it pays to reduce setbacks.

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