Packing for a weekend is easy. Packing up your life for four months — through changing seasons, work, dinners, weekends away and everything in between — is a different logistical problem.
You’d think that after moving more times than the number of fingers I have on my hands, I would be somewhat of an Olympian when it came to packing. You might equally assume I have a very impressive arsenal of suitcases, which I obviously don’t stuff the day before, and that they are all glamorous and convenient.
But I don’t like to follow anybody’s expectations.
Having just spent a stint of four months travelling around Europe armed with two very old, battered suitcases, I realised I had reached an age where I probably needed to rethink my packing strategies.
In light of yet another four-month-long stint (this time hopefully a lot more stationary), I found myself with another challenge at hand: how on earth does one pack for a four-month-long holiday? It requires an artistry of sorts. You can’t just fold bikinis and summer dresses when you’ll likely need to head to an office at some point, or brave the rainier days as the seasons change. Because that’s the other inconvenient catch: four months is enough time to catch not one, but two seasons of the year if you stay put in one place. Plus, I have big feet. Besides being overly conscious of them, I also happen to understand the spatial considerations they require.
Not to mention, how on earth are you supposed to fit all of that into a suitcase whilst still dealing with airline weight limits?
My first solution was an obvious one: get a better suitcase.
And the moment I began idealising what my dream suitcase would look like, I surprised myself with very clear requirements. For the lady who didn’t need much, I found myself to be suitcase-picky — I wanted it to be beautiful (obviously), easy to manoeuvre, efficient, safe and, of course, BIG.
So I found my LEVEL8 Voyageur, a Newsweek Readers’ Choice Award Winner so large that, when it first arrived, I was dutifully convinced I could fit inside.
Measuring an impressive (yet unusual) 16.7” L × 13.6” W × 32.1” H, the suitcase is slightly taller than it is wide, giving it a slender look of sorts. My creative brain associated its proportions to an elegant ballerina. Still fitting within most airline dimensions for long-haul flights, it resembles a trunk, with three different handles and an opening mechanism reminiscent of those old-school cases princesses somehow always seemed to travel with.
It is also, somewhat inconveniently, beautiful.
Half light blue and half black, the Voyageur Checked 30” is so sleek, structured and distinctive that my South American parents’ immediate reaction was to worry that somebody might steal it. Whilst there is little truth to their fears (most suitcases in LATAM do NOT get stolen at the airport), the Voyageur comes with an embedded lock system, keeping all my belongings pretty safe.
But whilst I had found a pretty incredible suitcase to suit my demands (pun totally, irrevocably intended here), I still had a complex task at hand.
Four months is a long time to be packing for.
Over the years, I have accepted that packing cubes are hyped up for a reason. Allowing you to fit infinitely more clothes (I’m not sure of the science behind this, but I swear it does), they also force you to pack by section. Given that you’ll put all your trousers in the same packing cube, it lets you visually and spatially understand just how much of each thing you’re taking. Plus, the Voyageur, with its handles located on the outside of the suitcase, lets you fit square packing cubes more efficiently, leaving less wasted space to stuff with socks and underwear.
Not that you even need to do that when your suitcase has a separate waterproofed pocket like mine does. I immediately claimed this for underwear, swimwear and anything else I wanted to keep segregated from the main event.
But organisation only gets you so far. The real trick, I have found, is to stop packing in outfits altogether.
Four months contains far too many hypothetical versions of yourself. There is the version who goes to the gym every morning, the one who gets invited somewhere fancy, the one who spends every weekend at the beach and, inevitably, the one who suddenly becomes convinced she needs a very specific pair of shoes she has not worn in approximately two years.
Packing for all of them is how you end up overweight at the check-in desk.
Instead, for this four-month endeavour, I’ve packed in categories. Trousers need to work with multiple tops. Jackets need to survive both an office and dinner. Shoes (particularly when cursed with feet my size) need to earn their frankly outrageous amount of real estate. I’ve ditched the boots, heavy sweaters and coats. Anything truly wintery (even though my trip will catch the tail end of South American winter) will be worn on board with me.
I’ve taken a similar approach to my electronics and oddly shaped belongings. Odd shapes take up enormous amounts of space in a suitcase and waste a lot of the space surrounding them too. This time, I have compiled only what can fit in my holdall, meaning my camera, chargers, tripods and knick-knacks come with me at all times.
There is, however, an annoying distinction between what you can fit inside a suitcase and what an airline will let you take.
And the Voyageur can fit a lot.
This became something of a double-edged sword. With so much usable space, I found myself far more constrained by my weight allowance than by the physical capacity of the suitcase itself. The Voyageur is also a relatively heavy suitcase to begin with, weighing around six kilograms empty, meaning every addition started to become a small mathematical negotiation.
Suddenly, the question wasn’t can I fit this? It very clearly would. The question was whether it deserved one of my remaining kilograms.
This is perhaps the least glamorous but most important part of packing for four months: weigh as you go. There is nothing quite as humbling as lovingly Tetris-ing your entire life into a suitcase, sitting on it to close the zip, and discovering at the airport that you’ve created a 31kg monster.
At the very limit, I closed my suitcase with 19kg, which, alongside the Voyageur’s rather heavy 6kg, brought my suitcase to 25kg, the maximum my airline allowed.
Armed with a suitcase weighing more than I lift in my CrossFit classes, the next hurdle was perhaps the most obvious: I now had to actually move the monster.
Badly accustomed to dragging my old suitcases behind me, I had assumed this might be an issue. But the Voyageur proved itself, remaining surprisingly easy to manoeuvre even with 25kg worth of my life packed inside it.
Despite feeling like a considerably more mature packer (and certainly armed with a few more tricks), I haven’t actually unpacked my suitcase since arriving. Instead, it’s tucked away in a corner, positioned almost like a trunk. I’ve opened it every now and then to fish out a few things, but thanks to the compartmentalisation, this hasn’t required turning my entire life upside down every time I need a fresh pair of socks.
There’s something quite nice about arriving somewhere new with only a fraction of your life in tow and seeing what fills the space.
I do, obviously, intend to unpack it soon. We can’t all be perfect.
