Arrivals
Learning to Lighten your Load
There's no question: overpacking tops the list of biggest travel mistakes.
So here is OneBag.com, a non-commercial Web site that teaches — in exhaustive (exhausting?) detail — the art and science of travelling light.
Here you can learn how to go pretty much anywhere, for business or leisure, for an indefinite length of time, with no more than a single carry-on-sized bag.
An experience that can — as I hope you will discover — be life-changing.
Why Travel Light?
Of all the travel skills you might acquire, travelling light is the one most likely to result in enjoyable, productive, stress-free travel experiences. For two thousand years, seasoned travellers have written of its many important benefits, including …
With a much-reduced need to hand your belongings over to the care of others, you are less likely to lose them to theft, damage, or misrouting. Similarly, you foil those who would enlist your unsuspecting aid as a conveyor of contraband goods. Attaining peace of mind is rarely this easy!
You can laugh at checked baggage fees. You don't have to pay porters and others to carry and store stuff for you. You are more able to take public transportation (just like airport personnel), rather than limos, shuttles, and (often scam-prone) taxis. You can even walk. All of which also bring you into more intimate (hence rewarding) contact with the people and places that you have come to visit.
Less stuff means greater mobility, thus more options. With no checked or awkward-to-manage luggage to limit your travel alternatives, you can better cope with delayed transportation & missed connections, and exploit unexpected opportunities. You can switch to other (sometimes earlier) flights when space is available, and use alternate transport (trains, rental cars, etc.) when it isn't. You needn't arrive at airports as early (no waiting for luggage check-in), and will be among the first to leave (while the hordes wait for baggage carousels and customs inspection queues). You can board trains, trams, and coaches with alacrity. You won't feel compelled to take the first hotel room offered, but can comfortably walk down the street should the ambience be unsuitable or the price unreasonable. You can sell your airplane seat (by volunteering to be "bumped") on full flights. You can travel as an air courier. You can be more spontaneous.
Travelling lightly reduces stress: it is simply a more hassle-free way to get about. You have more time, because packing takes little. You waste less energy hauling stuff. You know what you have, where everything is, and that it's sufficient. We've all seen those anxious folks at the airport, struggling with too much baggage, concerned that they have lost track of something, or left it behind. Foreign travel can be particularly challenging, because it is unfamiliar and less predictable. But the one-bag t