Secrets of Traveling Light
Secrets of traveling light
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
ON OUR OFFICIAL SLIMEY CRUD Motorcycle Gang 1000-mile road trip last summer (which was actually 1600 miles long, thanks to a slight miscalculation) one of our most revered members from the Detroit contingent, Wil Laneski, revealed a scientific break-through in lightweight packing technology that virtually stunned all of us at breakfast one morning.
Over our bacon and eggs, some of us straining to focus on our coffee cups through the dim haze of headaches from a small amount of extremely cheap wine drunk happily the night before, Wil revealed that his riding buddy Dennis Lappin always throws his underwear away after every day of riding.
Yes.
Wil woke up one morning on a bike trip to find his morning coffee boiling away over a roaring campfire of split oak and Jockey shorts.
Seems Dennis saves his threadbare underwear throughout the year-the kind most of us throw away in case we are ever in a car accident so the hospital won’t think we don’t have health insurance, or in case the nurse looks like Renee Zellweger-and uses it strictly for motorcycle trips. Each day, he throws it away, so his luggage gets lighter and lighter as the trip goes on.
Needless to say, this is nothing short of brilliant.
And it’s a concept that’s right up my alley. Like most of us, I have not just underwear, but all kinds of apparelsocks, T-shirts, etc.-that wear out every year and are simply deep-sixed. Why not save them for a motorcycle trip? In fact, a perceptive fashion critic might suggest that my entire wardrobe could be discarded, one piece at a time, on a motorcycle tour, with no great loss to the world.
In any case, it was an interesting revelation to one who has spent years trying to pack light, not just for motorcycling, but also for backpacking, canoeing, bicycling, piloting light aircraft, etc. Seems I’ve spent half my life weighing things in my hands like a human balance beam and wondering if I can take them along on a trip.
The most extreme example came along in 1987, when Barb and I circumnavigated the U.S. in an underpowered 1945 Piper Cub. The Cub, for reasons of weight and balance (not to mention its ability to stagger off the ground) is rated for only 20 pounds of baggage, which is not much for two people who have to travel for six weeks. And, in an airplane, this weight limit is not a mere suggestion-too much weight in the wrong place can kill you. So we learned to travel very, very light.
We could not throw any clothing away on our airplane trip-we had only two of everything and had to wash and dry things in the motel room each night-but we did devise a few other strategies worth remembering, and I used them again in packing for a two-week off-road trip in Baja (lavishly photographed and vividly described story to come). Here are a few conclusions reached, before and after the Baja trip:
1 ) It is never necessary to carry shampoo or soap. Even the kind of cheap, godforsaken motels I patronize usually have a small bar of soap that works for everything.
2) If you are a guy, get a really short Marine boot-camp haircut just before the trip, as I did for Baja and the Cub trip. Then you are not tempted to carry a comb, hairbrush, fancy styling mousse or a tin of Dapper Dan Pomade, which caused George Clooney so much trouble in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
3) Paper is heavy. Mail unneeded maps, brochures, etc. home as you travel. We had about 15 pounds of unneeded sectional charts waiting for us when we finished the Cub trip. If you must take a book along (and I must), take a thin, ageless classic that you can read over and over again, such as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or Cheerleaders in Heat.
4) As much as possible, take riding gear that doubles as rainwear. I now wear waterproof riding boots (no more of those torn Totes in the tankbag) and a
Gore-Tex jacket, saving the leather stuff for shorter trips and sunny days. When it rains, only some light rain pants are needed. In cooler weather, I take a two-piece Aerostich suit, though the pants are rather bulky to store if the weather gets hot. I also have some Gore-Tex touring gloves now that work for nearly all weather.
5) Always carry all your cash in $100 bills. Or 500 peso notes, in Mexico. No one will accept them, and you’ll be forced to use a credit card, saving weight and space on bulky change. At most gas stations, gift shops and roadside motels a $100 bill is as unspendable as a 1934 stock certificate from the TransManchurian Railway Company. Having only $100 bills will also prevent you from buying trashy souvenirs and bulking up on snacks.
6) Put all your high-powered emergency back-pain pills-Codeine, Vicodin, etc.-into a single white plastic Bufferin bottle, rather than many bottles. Try to remember the shape and markings on each one, so you can find the right pill by touch in the utter darkness of a cheap, godforsaken Mexican motel room when they’ve turned the generator off at bedtime.
This is just the tip of the weight-saving iceberg, of course. I’m sure there are many more things we could all think of, such as the old cut-the-handle-off-yourtoothbrush hint we used to see in backpacking guides. Forget that. Brushing with a short stub of a toothbrush makes you feel like a fool. And look like one, according to bystanders.
Also, as one last suggestion, I would advise you not to register with your correct home address at any motel in which you intend to abandon your old underwear.
