Luggage Rant

Whoa.  I have never gone for six days without posting!  Allow me to explain.  It’s simple — yes, something did happen.  The weather was exceptionally beautiful, and Andrew and I buckled down and sanded and painted/stained our entire gigantic deck.  That took forever… and afterwards, I was rendered useless.  It’s taken me days to recover.

Since I’m still pretty bagged… and since I just finished an 8 km walk with my friend K… I’m going to copy/paste from an email I composed earlier today.  I was writing to a friend who’s embarking on a fantastical journey and had a luggage question for me.  Just one innocent question from her, and I composed the following gigantic rant:

Ahhhh I love talking about the baggage situation. Like, I think about it a LOT and will never feel satisfied that there’s ever a right answer. We’ve always checked baggage, and it’s always made it to our destinations so far (knock on wood) except for last summer from Lima to Iquitos, because I sassed off to the girl at check-in and she withheld my luggage from the flight, that bitch. Anyway, even in that case, my luggage was not lost, it was deliberately withheld, we all know EXACTLY where it was. 😛

Me, on the Amazon River, with our lone luggage item. The other one was still in Lima at this point. D’oh!

I feel we’ve been lucky with the luggage thing, though. Although making sure you have enough time with all your connecting flights for your luggage to be transferred really helps. Tight connections = probably luggage left behind. I think it’s a given that it’ll be tossed around, fall several feet, and get rained on. Sometimes when I’m already seated on the plane I watch the baggage handlers through the windows, and I’ve seen all those things happen. 😛 Basically, I remind myself that my luggage may not make it to the destination and I’ll have to be okay with that idea. I try to bring the essentials on the plane with me. Which brings me to carryon… seems every carrier has a different carryon allowance… everyone’s paring down, and charging extra. Just be sure to study the carryon allowance for whichever carrier you’ve booked. It’s funny, I get really anal about that kind of thing and travel pretty lightly, and then I see people casually getting on the plane with like 3 carryon items. WTF. Okay anyway what I mean by “travel pretty lightly” is this: I check a carryon-sized suitcase, and carry on just my daypack. It’s ridiculous. I’m considering revising this! But I hate the idea of needing to store carryon in the overhead bins. If you sit in the exit row, you’ll have to no matter what because there’s no seats in front of you, but I MUCH prefer to put my bag on the floor under the seat in front of me. This way it’s a footrest, and I have all my stuff right there with me.

There.  That was my luggage-rant-by-email I sent to M during my lunch hour today.

Just so you know, I don’t consider myself an expert on any of these things.  These are just the thoughts that go through my mind based on my own experiences.  It’s all so utterly subjective!  I feel a little self-conscious even pasting the rant I sent to a trusted friend.  And yet I’m doing it anyway.  BOOM.