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).
