We’ve just spent the evening doing a check through all our gear and identifying anything missing – fortunately only minor items now … we have pretty much everything we need.
I’ve been able to rationalise a few things, which has been useful – save a bit of space and weight.
We finished up doing a test pack to see how we were going for space. It’s a tight fit, but Leanne got all her gear in her 60L pack – except for her fleece, which I think we can squeeze in with a bit of rearranging. Her pack ended up at 13.6kg.
My 80L pack is quite full – I’ve a little bit of space available if I squash things down a bit, and I’m at 14.6kg – I’m surprised at how little difference there is in weight between the two packs – especially given mine is 33% larger than Leanne’s (although I’m still to determine whether the 80L includes or excludes the gusset … it may well be that I’m only working with the equivalent of a 70L pack at the moment!)
Unfortunately my day-pack is approaching 10kg with the laptop, camera and lenses, plus all the other bits and pieces. I think I’ll be able to rationalise it a little bit, but most changes won’t make all that much difference to the overall weight. I might have to get a bit creative with how I distribute the weight – I’ll be studying the rules about carry-on luggage to see whether I can get away with two bags.
I’m not currently planning on using the day-pack that came with my travel-pack … I have another larger (and more comfortable and secure!) day pack for the laptop and camera gear. I might be able to use the spare day-pack to carry some of the smaller items like my jumper, water, books and other things to use on board – this will help distribute the weight a bit better, but at the cost of needing to carry two day packs. We’ll see.
One thing I will say now is that packing cubes are a wonderful invention – we have four sets of Sea To Summit mesh packing cubes (each set contains a small, medium and large cube) … two sets each – for all our clothing. Makes organising and finding things far easier than just shoving it all in the bag. They are very light and don’t add any bulk or weight to the bags at all.
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