Are you fly ready?
How to pack for a trip swaggily
Classified Spyfriends get on-demand recon in our SpyTalk Chat Room.
Our favorite independent stores from around the world are here.
Our Home Goods Index is here.
We just published two sletters about Summer Suits — Erin’s is here, Jonah’s is here.
What’s the best way to put your things into a suitcase?
There’s entire server farms devoted to posts that address this question. Most are lame. Some are clever. But while it’s fascinating to watch a video where someone shows you how to arrange 36 cubic feet worth of coats and boots into a single piece of carry-on luggage, hacks of that kind always put us in mind of those engineering puzzles that Google asks job applicants to solve…
And “applying for an engineering job at Google” is not the vibe when it comes to how Blackbird Spyplane likes to live!
At this point, we’ve established ourselves as the most crucial resource across all media for going cool places and doing cool things there, thanks to our various smash-hit travel reports, and the intel-rich city threads in our Global Intel Travel Chat.
Today, Erin and I (Jonah) are going to tackle the topic of How to Pack for a Trip in our own unique, holistic and unprecedented way, which is to say, profoundly, swaggily, with a bare minimum of “space-optimizing tips & tricks,” and our signature blend of the practical… and the mind-expanding.
Let’s kick things off with a statement of first principles —
🕊️ We are A.C.A.B. (Against Checking Any Bags). Yes. Erin and I limit ourselves to 2 pieces of carry-on-size luggage each. We’ve observed this policy on about 99.7% of trips we’ve taken in our adult lives, for many reasons. One reason is that we often go to several places during one multi-legged trip, so we want to be as lightweight as we can. Hauling a bunch of enormous s--t around a bunch of airports, train stations and subway stations sucks and looks goofy. Another reason is that when you go A.C.A.B. you don’t have to tack on ~60-120 minutes of stressed-out dead time at the airport waiting in line to check bags, waiting at baggage carousels for the bags, and — heaven forfend — dealing with the all-too-common headache of luggage going missing in transit.
🕊️ Perhaps the most important reason to avoid checked bags, though, is that limiting yourself to 2 carry-ons only creates a productive constraint: it forces you to avoid bringing along a bunch of extraneous s--t and, instead, to identify an elite unit of versatile essentials you enjoy wearing, no more, no less.
This turns out to be useful knowledge you can import back into your day-to-day life of putting s--t on, too. Speaking of which —
🕊️ In the weeks or ~month before a trip, when you find yourself feeling good in an outfit, jot down its component parts into a note. You can take a picture of yourself and put that picture in the note. When it comes time to pack, simply peep these notes and choose 2-3 field-tested, proven-joy-bringing outfits to take with you. Base the choice on obvious factors such as the weather where you’re headed, the dress codes of any dinners or parties on the docket, etc.
This way you won’t need to make crucial outfit decisions in a highly pressurized, error-prone, 24-hour pre-departure frenzy. That said —