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My wife and I are preparing to leave on a 2-week excursion to New Zealand (the North Island) as well as Bora Bora and after hitting up London with friends blow-out-style in a 36hrs crazy trip, we got addicted to travelling light.
The amount of stress that melts off your back when you only have 1 bag to worry about that you have with you at all times is just awesome. We did London with duffle bags (basically gym bags) but the only down side there was organizational control (not too many pockets on the duffle) and your shoulder gets a bit sore after a while.
During our preparation for this 2-week New Zealand/Bora Bora trip, we did a lot of research online about how to travel light, how to do one-bag-travel, travel effectively, etc.
Editor’s Note: By “we” I mean “my wife” and by “research” I mean “I nodded my head a lot when she told me how we were going to do this trip”.
We noticed quite a few people in forums, reviews, blogs, etc. mention the Kelty bags over and over again, specifically the “Redwing” series and specifically purchased from REI Outlet, so we started digging deeper. One of the things we liked right off the bat with these packs were the padded shoulder straps and both waist and chest clasps for keeping the weight of the pack evenly distributed across your upper body and not just dragging off your shoulders.
It seems that the Kelty Redwing come in 2 flavors, a 2650 sq/in size and a 3100 sq/in size. Both sizes have their own set of 3 or so colors that they can be had in. The difference between the two backpacks boiled down to the 2650 being a “big” backpack that is a safe carry-on item for an airplane assuming it’s not stuffed to the gills, and the 3100 being a “huge” backpack that would like need to get gate-checked if it was full to the brim (if it wasn’t stuffed to the gills and you had the compression straps on the side pulled tight, the 3100 could probably be a carry-on without much hassle).
After a lot of humming and hawing about which backpack to get and how to not spend $130 apiece on them, we found REI Outlet was offering a sale on the Kelty 2650’s for $54 apiece (at the time of this writing the sale is still going). We ordered two of the backpacks right away.
The breakdown of what we decided to pack was:
- 2 pants
- 2 shorts
- 2 T-shirts
- 2 long shirts
- 4 socks
- 4 underwear
- toiletries
- 1 extra pair of shoes
That’s the gist of what we packed, and it all fit into the bags perfectly with room to spare. If you decided to outfit the backpacks with a camel pack (which they have built-in support for) you would have room for that, or if you had an ultra-light laptop to include on the trip (which I intend to remedy when I get back) you could fit that in the back pocket (inside the pack) as well.
Overall we love the backpacks, but having not used them just yet, this is just a preliminary review, we’ll keep you posted during the trip and after with regard to how they are holding up and how we like them.
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November 2nd, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Hey so how did this end up panning out for you? We might have to check it out, that’s what we’re thinking of doing, only for more like 3 years (but what’s the difference really, no?). Thoughts on a small laptop too while we’re at it? We were looking at the eee as a starting point…?
November 2nd, 2008 at 3:38 pm
G,
It worked out great and having a ultra-light laptop was *exactly* one of the things I missed. I imagine for email/docs/etc the EEE should work out pretty well, I’m a bit partial to ThinkPad’s, so I’d suggest looking at the 12″ models, they are ultra light (like 2.something lbs) and great/rugged build quality. I was looking at the X300 as a perfect blend of performance/size, but unfortunately the price is ridiculous right now ($2600) while the SSD drives are still expensive.
I also looked at the Dell 1330 as well, but over 5lbs seemed unnecessary for a 13″ monitor, and almost made it more of a burden to carry. I’d definitely suggest to stay as close to 3lbs or lighter as you can get.