The first major purchase for my nomadic travels was my primary travel bag,: the: Red Oxx Air Boss: carry on bag,: co-developed by Doug Dyment of OneBag.com.
There are number of things that I like about the bag, in no particular order:
- The bag is: really small when you don’t have anything in it, meaning it packs up nicely when not in use.
- It’s designed specifically for traveling on extended trips without checking your bag.
- It’s well built (if I were ever being chased by an assassin, I feel like I could throw the bag at him, knocking both the would-be assassin and bag into the street where they both got ran over by a bus, and the bag would be fine).
The bulk of your clothing goes in two large side pockets, which is convenient for me since I can use one side for business apparel (a suit, 3 dress shirts, a belt, two ties, and dress shoes). I use the other side for: more casual clothing, including sweatpants, a: couple of T-shirts, a pair of shorts, gym shorts, tennis: shoes, and a couple of casual button: up shirts. The middle section houses a pair: of flip flops, undershirts, underwear, socks, and my toiletries bag, which right now is just: a plastic zip lock bag sitting in a Gristedes plastic bag.
Perhaps the biggest disadvantage is also what it was designed for: bundle wrap packing. This is great for minimizing wrinkles and maximizing space, but: the biggest disadvantage is that it requires you to take everything out of your bag just access one article of clothing.
Doug says: this isn’t too much of a problem because it can be nice to actually unpack your bag while traveling so you don’t feel like you’re living out of a suitcase. While I agree with that when you’re staying at a hotel,: the problem is that when you are crashing on someone’s couch (e.g. your brother’s place in College Station) you don’t want to take the liberty to just: strew your clothing everywhere in the: living room (it’s a love seat, not a glove seat).
