The
Obsession with Suitcases
August 6, 1995
Chicago: Is it only road-warriors
who become obsessed with the perfect suitcase? I realized
this morning that I had entered a world as bizarre as
the world of Elvis memorabilia-collectors when I struck
up a conversation with a perfect stranger in LaGuardia
airport about the merits of different models of TravelPro
"rollaboard" suitcases. I've got two different models
of TravelPro, plus a garment bag that hooks onto them,
plus a duffel bag and a small briefcase that all hook
together like Lego blocks.
As if that's not enough, I've got a Tumi rollaboard
and my newest addition, a Targus Sherpa rollaboard that
seems capable of holding every bit of computer equipment,
cables, and accessories in my possession. And that doesn't
count, of course, the dozen or so conventional suitcases
and garment bags that sit stacked behind the sofa, creating
the impression that a small army of tourists from Des
Moines has just landed in our living room. I can't help
poring over every suitcase ad in the airline magazines,
and I have nightmares that I'll wake up one morning
and find that I have as many suitcases as Imelda Marcos
had shoes.
The occasional traveler cares little or nothing about
any of this, but you can tell a real road-warrior when
you see his eyes light up at the mention of Tumi and
Boyt and TravelPro. When you're on the road three weeks
out of four, and when you live out of your suitcase
for two or three weeks at a time, it's no longer an
academic issue: your suitcase becomes your home. A suitcase
whose zippers break when they're overstuffed is a disaster;
equally frustrating is the suitcase that arrives on
the baggage carousel, after a short domestic flight,
looking like it was used as ammunition in the Bosnian
War.
Until roughly three years ago, all of this was much
simpler: I carried a garment bag and a medium-sized
briefcase on shorter trips, and a couple of large, heavy
suitcases if I was embarking on a longer journey. Like
many road-warriors, I was obsessed with carrying everything
on board the plane, and for a while it was a good strategy.
But things have changed in the past couple of years...
For one thing, everyone carries their baggage
on board; in addition to garment bags and small suitcases,
there are shopping bags, small animal crates, duffel
bags, dogs, cats, and small chickens stuffed into the
overhead bins. If I'm lucky enough to use my frequent-flyer
status to board early, I can stuff my suitcase into
the limited space before the rest of the horde arrives;
but if you're in the middle of the line, and half the
plane has boarded before you arrive, chances are that
you won't find room to put much more than a small briefcase
in the storage space.
Meanwhile, the amount of stuff that I have to drag with
me has increased. I used to carry a simple laptop computer
in addition to a bag full of clothes ... now, on any
trip longer than two days, I carry a backup computer,
cables, AC adaptors for the computer, acoustic coupler,
screwdriver, telephone cable, various combinations of
RJ-11 phone jacks, AC plug-converters for whatever foreign
countries I'm visiting ... and the list goes on, and
that doesn't count the books and files and business
papers. The result is typically a Rollaboard-size suitcase
filled with 75-100 pounds of electronic junk; swinging
that up over my head to stuff in a luggage bin is no
fun at all.
You might regard the idea of a backup computer as excessive,
but if you carry all of your work on your computer,
as I do, you can get pretty paranoid about backup. I
learned my lesson the hard way last year, when the hard
disk on my computer crashed just as my flight took off
from New York en route to Santiago, Chile. I suddenly
realized that, in addition to not having backup slides
for the presentation I was supposed to give in Chile,
I didn't have (a) the name and address of the hotel
where I was staying, (b) the name and address of the
client for whom I was working, (c) my things-to-list,
(d) the various work-projects I was in the midst of
... and so on. I spent a long, difficult, unpleasant
week in Chile and Peru before returning home to backup
computer equipment.
One other interesting note about carry-on and rollaboard
suitcases: they're not so practical on many international
flights, especially if your case is filled with heavy
books and electronic equipment. The reason: many of
the international flights require passengers to deplane
by walking down a steep stairway ramp; then it's into
a bus crammed full of grumpy passengers; then the bus
dumps everyone at the entrance to the airport building,
at which point everyone has to traverse an obstacle
course of steps, ramps, and other obstructions for which
the bags-on-wheels were not designed. There are times
when it's easier to check it all, and just wait patiently
for the bags to appear on the baggage carousel...
If you do carry computer equipment, check out
the Targus Sherpa; it's available from all of the mail-order
computer-supply places for about $180, and it's the
best thing I've found so far for packing all of the
aforementioned computer junk. But nothing is perfect:
on my American flight from New York to Chicago, I found
that a fully-loaded Sherpa bag is really a little too
big to fit in the overhead bin of a McDonnell-Douglas
Super80 airplane, even in first class. With some additional
muscle-power, I managed to cram it in, but if the flight
attendants had been in a bad mood, they could have invoked
their official book of procedures and doomed by bag
and its delicate electronics to the belly of the plane.
