Essential Travel Packing Tips
Published April 29, 2022 · 11:13 · 310,043 views
About This Video
Begin packing when you know your departure date. Even if it is years away. That is the rule. Van has been packing for a Mexico trip since a year before departure, and part of the packing is replacing the engine of his Land Cruiser.
The philosophy unfolds through rules and violations. Don't pack more than you can carry for a quarter mile. Always pack a bathing suit. It doubles as pajamas, spare underwear, and the thing you need when someone invites you swimming. Pack an extension cord for foreign outlets. His friend Chloé: a sailor who's been around the globe three times, holds three passports. Arrived for a multi-country trip packed remarkably light and still had presents for everyone. That's the standard. Van once packed nothing but a Swiss Army knife for a trip from New York to Paris to Cannes to Berlin. The underwear system in foreign countries defeated him. He'll never do that again.
Transcript
Always pack a bathing suit. A bathing suit is pajamas, spare clothes if something goes wrong with your regular clothes, it's a bathing suit, underwear. Usually when you go on a trip someone invites you swimming. Always pack a bathing suit. So somebody asked me in the comments on my Patreon what is your packing philosophy and I could talk for hours about my packing philosophy. A few weeks ago my friend Chloé who to me embodies the spirited woman. She's the greatest adventurer that I know. She's sailed around the globe like three times on a sailboat. She has a pilot's license. She lived in Berlin for almost 20 years. She's lived in Cairo. She's lived in Beirut. She has three passports. I think she has an American passport, a Canadian passport and a Polish passport.
Chloé was the first person to ask me what Qui Transtulit Sustinet means. It's latin and I engraved it in the subframe of my motorcycle, maybe 10 years ago. She was the first person to ever ask me. So Chloé was packed for basically an around-the-world adventure. She was flying from Toronto to Mexico City to Oaxaca to Mexico City to Los Angeles to Tahiti. And she was with a child, a three-year-old, and she had packed remarkably light and yet she had presents. She had a present for Isabel. She had a present for me and she had a present for X. I think she might have had a couple presents for X. And she is a master adventurer and one of the skills of a master adventurer is the ability to pack. And I think the first tenet of my philosophy is that begin packing when you know your departure date.
Even if the departure date is years away. So I've begun packing for a Mexico trip that I don't think I'm going to be able to embark on until this December and I've been packing for it for a year, and part of the packing for it is replacing the engine of my Land Cruiser. Packing is the second step on an adventure after you plan what the adventure will be. I think this is obvious but if you've packed perfectly that means you've used every item that you've packed. Which doesn't mean you've done the adventure perfectly because if you packed a first aid kit and you use the whole thing that means your adventure, something went wrong or maybe that is a perfect adventure. But once as a sort of control... We are checking one bag... I went on a trip from New York City to Paris to Cannes to Berlin, and I think it was a relatively short
trip. It was maybe five or seven days and I only packed a swiss army knife. I'm pretty sure that's all I packed, besides like what was on my body and I didn't even have extra socks or underwear and I will never do that again. Do not do that because when you go to foreign places the whole shopping system is different - like the underwear system, the socks system. And then you might spend the whole trip either gross and uncomfortable or in a constant state of just shopping and needing things. Not sure if I mentioned but I wish I had packed a phone charger. Pack an extension cord with the three prong holes on it, kind of a heavy duty extension cord especially in foreign countries where the power thing is weird. Because you can usually get a little adapter that plugs into the wall and then your devices have little computers built into the chargers that know that oh that's you know a 220 volt or 140 volt versus the 110 we have here in america and you just kind of
always need an extension cord. Always and also rubber bands. I pack a luxury item that I only wear when I'm on the road it's sort of my reward. One of my rewards for being on the road and these are a pair of Swiss slippers that Isabel's sister and brother-in-law gave me. Do not pack more than you can carry all by yourself for a distance of one quarter mile. That's one of my rules because you never know what's gonna happen. You never know if the car is gonna break down when you're in Morocco, which happened to me once. You don't know what's gonna happen. Adventure packing is among the most sophisticated and complicated packing. So when you read books about great adventures like Endurance about Shackleton, a lot of the book talks about what they packed. I believe it's in Moby Dick Melville writes
about how in the captain's quarters was a little chest that had the needle and thread in it because if those sails, they didn't have motors, if those sails tore you were... So they absolutely could not lose the needle and thread to repair the sails. It was such an important item that the captain himself was in possession of it and I think the equivalent of that in modern times is your passport. The Spirited Man is brought to you by: The Spirited Man Patreon team. Join our Patreon team at five dollars a month for exclusive access to archival videos with director's commentary and peer discussions and live streams answering your questions and comments. This packing philosophy episode was an idea from one of our patrons. Link in the description. The heaviest I've ever packed was I went to Mexico for four months on a surf trip so that I could surf for
four months and just clear my head. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I had an F-350 and I packed a 200cc motorcycle, which coincidentally was the biggest bore motorcycle you could bring across the mexican border before you needed a special kind of paperwork so it didn't count as bringing another vehicle. I packed a typewriter. I packed books in a little chest. I packed camping gear with cooking gear. And the idea with that was that I was planning to stay in hotels but I had the option to camp if I got too remote and that gave me the freedom, the option to camp, gave me the freedom to not have to give myself hard destinations every day and then I had the dirt bike in case the truck broke and I needed to get somewhere. And I had packed perfectly. I mean I didn't use every single item but... The F-350 was a big, discreet work truck. So I didn't draw any attention to myself traveling through Mexico. I think that kept me safe.
This is mostly what I'm packing for the biggest adventure of my life. The most sophisticated packing I've ever done, the most complicated packing I've ever done, was for a Baja trip down the Baja peninsula and it was a thousand miles each way. And that was complicated because I was also the sort of trip mechanic and there's an entire book that's basically dedicated to how to pack for motorcycle adventures. The thing about multi-day motorcycle trips is that it's definitely going to rain but if you pack waterproofed it probably won't. So we didn't get rain on this Baja trip but we got 11 flat tires. Fixed the flat we just put it back on the bike now. And Nev punched a hole in his crank case but we had packed for those inevitabilities. Tell us about the most important thing a motorcyclist can bring on an adventure. This stuff. What's it called? It's called plumber's epoxy.
So I had like a compressor. I had the tire irons, spare patches and spare tubes and we were able to just deal. It was a pain in the neck and that heat changing by hand in the desert those flat tires and it was a pain in the neck to plug the hole in the crank case of Nev's motorcycle but it saved us that day. I don't know what we would have to do - double up go into a town, come back, leave the motorcycle there and it just saved us - and that was packing heavy. But packing thoroughly, carefully made it unfold in a certain way. That's another thing about packing: the manner by which you pack has an impact on how the trip will unfold and that's a wonderful and fun and artistic thing to keep in mind while you're in fact packing. And so in Baja I was so overloaded on my 650cc motorcycle, I was so overloaded with all this gear, a few hundred pounds of gear, and the terrain was so rough we were off-road for
days and days and days on end that I broke my subframe and when I replaced the subframe I for some reason said I'm going to engrave something in the subframe. And so in the subframe I engraved Qui Transtulit Sustinet, which is the Connecticut state motto. And it means the transplanted sustain. I think that traveling and adventure at times might be preparation for transplantation. And Qui Transtulit Sustinet encouraged me to get the hell out of Connecticut which began my life of adventure. This week on the Patreon, archival videos with director's commentary on my Patreon right there.
Products & Tools Mentioned
- Swiss Army knife essential
- Toyota Land Cruiser essential
- F-350 (Ford) uses
- plumber's epoxy essential
- Swiss slippers uses
People Referenced
Chloe (master adventurer), Isabelle, Nev (Schulman), Shackleton
Books Mentioned
- Endurance
- Moby Dick