Average Traveler

I have become average.

I am now average at something I used to be good at.

I used to be an experienced, one-bag, minimalist traveler. Now, apparently, I have lost those skills. Therefore I make the claim that travel is only like riding a bike if you are actually riding upon a bicycle. You don’t pick up where you left off.

Or maybe COVID did more to my brain than I realized.

Let me start off with a confession. I have apparently brought a hundred pounds of luggage on this trip.

For many years, I would bring my little blue roller bag, the one that fits so neatly under the seat and never gave me a bit of trouble.

How is it, then, that I have found myself pulling items out of one bag and putting them into another so that I don’t have to pay $75 for an overweight bag??

“Jeans, towels,” shares the baggage clerk, offering examples of heavy things that might be quick to grab.

Towels?? Who the heck packs a towel?? Where are people going? What destinations do not include towels? If you’re staying with family, and they have no towels, perhaps then it would make sense to bring a few. If you’re staying at a towel-free hotel then I simply hope it is not at a nudist colony.

I realized that if my bag was overweight, then my suitcase must have weighed 54 pounds. The other bag weighed 40. (Ish?) Therefore, my checked bags weighed a combined total of 94 pounds. Added to my laptop bag and my carryon, it was quite likely I was dragging at least a full hundred pounds onto my flight.

I should have realized this earlier, when I was staging the bags in our minuscule hallway and I tripped over the duffle bag and almost went flying.

This is the amateur traveler I have become: tripping and stumbling over my own oversized, overweight luggage.

I had to repack my suitcase because I had trouble zipping it closed, and then I realized that I hadn’t put in my shower kit. I had dropped in some nicely folded stacks of clothes straight out of the laundry basket.

My usual method is to lay everything in flat, lining up the shoulder seams or waistbands with the top edge of the suitcase, and then flipping in all the sleeves and hanging hems. It’s fast, has fewer wrinkles, and seems to fit more stuff.

That was probably where I got myself into trouble. Those additional four overweight pounds got crammed in during that second pass.

“I’m packing like this is a road trip,” I realized, “and I have the trunk and the back seat all to myself.”

I actually did all right with my carryon bags. The work laptop is what it is. All I had in there was the laptop itself, my fob, noise-canceling headphones, my work bullet journal, charging cables, and a pen.

The other carryon was mostly for the benefit of the MicroClimate helmet, just in case someone forced me to stow it. Otherwise, all it had was my wallet, keys, lip balm, sunglasses, iPad, and a Band-Aid. I probably could have carried most of those things in my pants pockets.

It surprised me, as I passed through various airports, how heavy and cumbersome those two bags were. I’m just not as fit as I used to be. Remind me to weigh these bags - but I suspect I would have been a bit tired just from standing in line and walking from one gate to another.

I saw someone lifting a carryon into the overhead bin, something that used to be a negligible task on my own trips. I realized I would have struggled to do this for myself if I had packed a larger bag.

Something else that I noticed, as I dragged my unwieldy pile of detritus hither and thither, is that my heart was beating very hard. While I certainly need to get back in shape, I have never in my life struggled so much with the physical act of hauling my own stuff.

Or, rather, the last time I felt this way was as a 26-year-old, moving my stuff into my fourth-floor walk-up college dorm. I thought I would black out. I was having a harder time than my hugely pregnant friend who was helping me.

A couple months later, I was running up and down those same stairs. All I can do is hope that a similar opportunity to rebound is presenting itself. Carrying luggage is functional fitness.

Something else that I did during my trip, that is very average, is that I underestimated how long it would take a rideshare driver to pick me up, and I also underestimated traffic time, and I also underestimated how long it would take to check my bags, and I also underestimated how long it would take to go through security.

I gave myself two hours to get from my apartment to my gate at the airport, and wound up twenty minutes behind schedule.

When I arrive, I will be tested. I will unpack and go about my business, and I will find out whether I misjudged anything else. Namely, did I bring everything I actually needed?

It’s woefully common for people to get very distressed about what outfits to wear on their trip, only to forget something truly important like their ID or their glasses or their inhaler.

Have I done this? Not sure yet.

As the world starts to return to normal, and the statistical picture starts to improve, I suppose I will start feeling as normal as everyone else again. That probably means I will return to traveling at least a bit. This experience has shown me how rusty I am. What that means is more work for myself, more hassle and inconvenience, and an inevitable ripple effect as other people are forced to deal with my big heavy bags.

Time to remember who I am and start getting my act together. Make it simple, make it easy, and make sure not to stumble on it.