Introduction

“Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht” ~ an old Yiddish adage

Good day (or night) and welcome to my master class on how to travel, as a family, with each member of the family flying personal item only. If you follow my instructions to the letter, depending on the length of your trip, you will need to do laundry and will be repeating outfits. Deal breaker?

If either of these are unacceptable, aren’t you glad you didn’t spend any money buying this book? I front load the dealbreakers to save us both time and money. If, however, you don’t care that you wore that shirt on the trip before so long as it is clean, you’ve found your people! Buy the book!

My name is Jennifer, and I am a world traveler. I have been flying internationally for over 40 years. I’m also a mother, and have circumnavigated the globe with my own delightful offspring twice at the time of this authorship. I’ve taken my family to England, Spain, Greece, Sharjah UAE, Egypt, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and of course various locations within the USA. And every member of my family including The Offspring flew personal item (or diaper bag, when they were a lap child) only, well, with the exclusion of having to check the car seat. It can be done. And I’ll tell you how I do it.

I wasn’t always a personal item only traveler. Like most of you, I started out with a checked bag and an Onboard Bag. It is how my parents packed; a checked bag with tons of clothes, full sized tubes of toothpaste, backup shirts for my backup shirts, toys, books, and more. As we do, I followed my parents’ example, believing that they’d figured out The Travel Baggage System.

When I was seven, I flew as an unaccompanied minor to visit my relatives in England. This was in an era before wheeled luggage was the norm, and so I dutifully packed my checked duffel bag onto a luggage cart, a sort of folding hand truck that were very commonly used to give a bag wheels, and wore my Onboard bag on my shoulder. The duffel bag was checked, and the wheeled luggage cart was folded and stuck into the overhead bin along with everyone else’s luggage carts, coats, and other paraphernalia that wasn’t allowed to be checked but also wasn’t necessary for immediate in flight use; this is the original purpose of those overhead bins.

I reconnected with my duffel bag at Gatwick’s baggage claim and strapped it back onto my luggage cart. How capable I felt, being able to roll my massive luggage around using my tiny body.

What I hadn’t accounted for, were stairs. The luggage cart could not roll up the stairs, and when packing, I hadn’t paid attention to weight. My duffel bag weighed quite a bit.

We all have formative moments, those which create core memories that later shape the person we become. This was one of mine, standing at the base of a flight of stairs; I was facing an insurmountable task.

Being all of 7 years old, I was given assistance by my Aunt and Uncle, but I knew my desire for independent travel in my future could not rely on others to help me navigate stairs, and I would need to find a different solution.

My different solution: pack only into what could fit under the seat in front of me on the airplane. No need for wheels. Could wear on my back while climbing stairs. Cannot be too heavy because no room for extra weight. Brilliant. And thus started my three decades and counting quest to perfect personal item only packing: My Travel Baggage System.

But what about having enough clothing? I’ll tell you all about my education on laundry in the laundry chapter.

Children are expensive, and traveling as a family can be cost prohibitive. However, there exist a category of airlines called Ultra Low-Cost Carriers (ULCC)¹, lower cost than even Low-Cost Carriers. The catch is that ULCC charge for everything.

All you get for a very cheap price is a seat on the plane, and the space under the seat in front of you. Which means that if you can pack each person into a single personal item, then you can fly across the USA for as little as $50 a person.

In addition to extending travel budgets, having to wrangle children is cumbersome. Adding additional bags or even larger bags to that can be overwhelming, restricting mobility and leading to choices such as taking expensive taxis rather than the free airport train or bus. This is often borne as simply the tax on family travel, but it doesn’t have to be. You just have to pack lighter (weight) and more compactly (volume), and yet without depriving yourself of anything.

If this sounds like the sort of travel you are interested in doing, if this would lead to more family travel adventures, more family memories made, more cosmopolitan exposure to the world for your children, then this is the book for you. I hold back no secrets, and you will be able to achieve your lightest most compact family travel too!

The ability to put your toothbrush into one jacket pocket and a change of underwear into another and then head to the airport is based on privilege. We don’t all have that same privilege.

Replacing already-owned items with newer, lighter, more compact versions requires room in the budget, and we don’t all have that same budget flexibility.

Requiring only a few changes of clothes or only one pair of shoes or devoting minimal space in luggage to medical needs is health privilege, and we aren’t all in the same health situation.

So even if you cannot get as minimal as I can for myself and my family, you can still learn the mindset of ingenuity, creativity, adaptation, and puzzle solving which serves us all well.

According to the ancient Yiddish proverb, “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht,” which translates to “Man Plans, and God Laughs,” the Road of Life is unpredictable no matter how carefully we plan (Levine, 2016)³. No matter what emergencies and instances you’ve packed for, you’ll likely find yourself in an unanticipated situation for which the personal item only mindset, if not the single bag, will offer solutions. A mindset is free, weighs nothing, and takes no space in your bag.

This book isn’t an absolute. There is no single right way to succeed. And aside from a goal of posting on /r/HerOneBag⁴ or /r/OneBag⁵ to get likes, there is no requirement to do any of this, yet there is reason to want to do what is not required.

Wheels up!