How to Use This Book

This book is purposefully an electronic book. With this formatting it allows me to show, not tell, how to do complex manuverings, link you directly to the items I am specifically discussing, and help you jump around in the book rather than having to read through paragraphs that don’t interest you.

Links to content both external and internal will be indicated by text of a slightly different color. Here is an example of link text.¹ Clicking on that link will take you to a minimalist personal item only loadout for a young, childless man; not family travel at all. Still, might make for some interesting reading.

One of my favorite exercises to do with my students - I’m a former high school science teacher - was to have them write a step by step, intricately detailed procedure for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Despite six years of teaching, not a single student wrote a procedure that, when followed literally, produced a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Writing specific, thorough instructions is hard. And there’s no point in doing that when in an eBook, I can simply offer you a video that shows, rather than tells, how to do the thing. If I’d assigned my students the task of making a sandwich explainer video, they’d have nailed the assignment!

Which is why there are times that I will be giving you, amazing reader, videos for the complex procedural bits. They will look like this when they appear in the body of the text (see below).

All you need do is click/tap on that above image, which you can tell is a video due to the lack of the word “Figure” in the beginning of the caption, and it will take you to the video in question.

But what if you are reading this on an eReader that is not internet connected or isn’t capable of playing videos? That is where following the footnote² located in the text surrounding the video will come in handy. The link, in longhand, will be located in that footnote.

From time to time there will be images which are not links. Those, as the one below, will be indicated by the initial word “Figure” in the caption as this one is.

All external links will be written in longhand in footnotes originating from text near the video or exactly after the link.

The best way to discover whether a link is an internal one - meaning one that simply whisks you away to another part of the book - is to tap on it. Try by tapping the word “pockets” to see!