In fact, I'm leaving on a trip soon — sort of a mini South East Asia adventure with my BF, brother and cousin — to Thailand, Cambodia and Bali, and am definitely feeling the excitement building. In fact, my BF and I, being the nerds that we are, have already done a dry packing run. What's that you ask? Well, it means we've packed our bags to see if all the things we want to bring with us will fit, which is really just an excuse to play out the pre-trip ritual of packing. While some people might hate packing, we actually love it as it gets us amped up for the trip ahead.
For this trip, we'll be packing light; we're basically only bringing a carry-on sized backpack to house all our clothing, gear and other necessities. I picked up the awesome Osprey Porter travel back pack at my local REI for this purpose. At $99, the price is right too.
So far, so good. It's pretty roomy with a main, easily accessed main compartment, top pocket for quick-grab items and cinching straps to keep everything tied down. I've also paired my pack with a couple packing cubes, which has made quite the difference.
A few other packing necessities for this trip:
- safety whistle - we'll be traveling overland from Bangkok to Siem Reap and well, you just never know.
- door stop - a couple of our nights will be spent in budget places. While they've all received good TripAdvisor ratings, again, I'd rather be safe than sorry. The rubber door stop was an idea I actually picked up from reading the Legal Nomads blog and it's a good one as it's a fairly easy and inexpensive way of giving yourself added peace of mind.
- laundry detergent - for those dang-i'm-out-of-underwear days :)
- Med supplies: aspirin, band aids, neosporin, sleep aid, Imodium
See you on the road (in Asia)! I'm looking forward to more of this...
