Spend Big, Pack Big

My wife and I are not planning to travel right away, but I am still obsessed with planning a trip that could materialize later this year. Today’s gut-wrenching decision: carry-on or checked bag?

When we went to Mexico, expecting to stay two days, we took a big checked bag and one small backpack. The low-budget airline we took charged about the same amount for checked bags and carry-ons, and we figured they could manage not to lose our luggage on a nonstop flight, so this is the strategy we chose. It worked.

Other than that, we have always taken at least one big bag each, one backpack for electronics and valuables, and maybe some other small bags. It has worked well for us most of the time.

The only times we had problems, we were part of the chains of failure.

On a trip back from somewhere or other, I failed to collect my checked bag at JFK and take it through customs. I thought it was checked all the way through. The airline brought it to me a day or two later. No big deal.

On a trip back from the mediocre destination known as Ireland, Air France and Aer Lingus stole my wife’s checked bag. They and Heymondo, our crooked insurer, refused to pay. The bag turned up months later, missing several hundred dollars’ worth of possessions, which we had to replace at our own expense. The bag itself was ruined, because, you know, it’s impossible to store a sturdy hard-sided bag on a shelf for several months without ripping it apart. Bags I leave in my closets fly apart all the time.

We checked the bag at a kiosk in Dublin. She had an Aer Lingus flight to France, an Air France flight to Johannesburg, and an Airlink flight to Lusaka. The kiosk printed us a bag tag for Paris. As a result, the airlines took the bag to Paris and left it there.

Not running airlines personally, we didn’t know the airline had made an error. We had this idea that they had huge global computer networks that routed bags to their correct destinations based on passenger names, originating flights, confirmation numbers, and common sense. We didn’t know the final destination had to appear on the tag.

The airlines do this so often, there is a name for it: “short-tagging.”

The airlines screwed up, but if we had been more seasoned and more adept at catching their disgraceful, inexcusable mistakes, we would have gotten the tag fixed in Dublin.

The part where they and the insurer all lied to us for months was not our fault at all and not foreseeable. That’s on them.

Having had these experiences, we have been considering learning to cram all our stuff into carry-ons. Carry-on bags are positively chic now. If you check a big bag, people make fun of you, as though you’re some kind of rube because you don’t want to wear the same pants 8 days in a row.

Pro-carry-on arguments sounded so smart to me, I ordered a really nice carry-on, and it arrived today. I think I’m going to send it back without opening it. This very week, I wrote a piece listing my reasons for wanting a smaller bag. Since then, some things have occurred to me. I’m not saying I was WRONG about anything, because that could never happen. Merely that I may not have been totally 100% correct.

I told MY truth.

1. The rate of truly lost bags is somewhere below 1 in 200. The vast majority of “lost” bags are merely delayed a day or two.

2. You don’t actually have to fill a checked bag with things you can’t stand to lose, and you can put clean underwear and socks in your pockets when you fly, enabling you to survive until your bag arrives.

3. If you take a big bag, you have a place to put things you buy while traveling. If you take a carry-on, you’re going to sit on it and put it in a hydraulic press and do whatever else you have to do to get as much junk as possible into it before you leave. You will not be able to jam souvenirs into it.

4. If you check a big bag, you never have the common problem of suffering with small luggage and also having to check your tiny bag at the last minute because the airline didn’t plan.

5. With a big bag, you can go a week or more without doing laundry. Laundry is expensive, and doing laundry in a bathtub is no fun. People who use small bags often wear things over and over, which is gross.

6. People complain about the time it takes to collect a checked bag. This is silly. If losing 30 minutes is that big a deal, your vacation is too short, and you will lose your mind when you get to customs and immigration, not to mention the lines at places like the Vatican and the Acropolis. Disney World will make you wish for death.

7. Travel is about memories, and if there are no pictures or videos, it never happened. Good camera gear is a lot better than your Iphone. If you have a checked bag, you have more options for carrying things like extra lenses and remote mike sets. These things take up room, and you won’t want to check them. The more junk goes in your checked bag, the more camera gear can go in your backpack or an extra carry-on. If you don’t have a remote mike set, and there is any wind at all when you shoot, and the camera is over a foot away from whoever you’re shooting, no one will be able to hear anything you or your companions say, and you may say very important things. “WHUMP WHUFF WHUMP WHUFF WHUFF love you WHUMP WHUFF WHUMP live without you WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP marry me and make me the happiest WHUFF WHUFF WHUFFITY WHUMP.” Is that what you want to hear 50 years later?

8. I saw a guy complain about moving around with big bags. I have traveled with a huge rollaboard and a backpack that weighed around 20 pounds. No problem. You only have to move your own luggage when you’re between vehicles. Cars have trunks. Buses and trains have racks. Moving your own bags is good for you, and it will help you gain less weight on your trips. Lifting an inadequate 25-pound bag is not much easier than lifting a 35-pound bag that fills all your needs.

9. If you have a big bag, you can dress more appropriately. You can bring two pairs of shoes. You can bring real pants and a jacket. You won’t find yourself at a Michelin-starred restaurant in cargo shorts.

The main problem with a checked bag is that a disgusting pervert who is also a high official in the Biden administration may steal it so he can wear your clothes, but this only happens if you’re female or think you’re female. There haven’t been any cases of confused XX Biden appointees stealing gender-correct clothing from actual men.

I’m starting to think that carry-ons are for short trips to third-rate destinations like Cancun and Miami. You land on Friday night, drunk. You lie on the beach drunk until Sunday afternoon. You fly home drunk Sunday night, thinking about RU-486 and/or penicillin. If you’re flying home from Miami, maybe you’re concerned about a fresh bullet wound. For a situation like that, a carry-on is perfect. For multi-week trips to nice places, a big bag seems to make more sense.

I think I should return this thing. This is what I get for listening to millennials who wear mildew-smelling knee-length basketball shorts everywhere they go.