This is my carry-on hand luggage. Yes, that is black duct tape, yes I do love it.
I bought it for $5 at a thrift store in Long Beach, CA, and on that trip alone I took it to 12 cities, 6 states and 2 countries. In a pocket I found an in-room information card from a hotel in Shanghai, China, and that sealed the deal for me. I wanted a bag that could handle world travel. I was going to take it all over Mexico. I didn’t want a squeamish bag.
It’s very small, it fits into overhead compartments and under seats, it even fits into the trunk of a Fiat 500!
Its small but it holds a lot of clothes, or a little bit of clothes and a lot of shoes – depending on what the trip requires. It has several pockets on the front and two zipper compartments inside, it even has a secret bonus compartment along the side that is perfect for stashing dirty underwear and socks. Lots of compartments mean I don’t have to dig around or dump out the entire bag to find something. I hate it when I have to dump everything out to find something, you have to repack every time. This is important if you are living out of your suitcase and / or are in many places in a short time. I like a bag I can live out of for the entire weekend without repacking.
This is a very thoughtful, well balanced bag. It has handles on the top and on the side so you can carry it either way, up or down. Up and down stairs and through skinny hallways or aisle ways, something you can´t do with an overloaded duffle bag. And no matter how I stuff it the zippers still hold, and I have stuffed it: I have miraculously fit 2 weeks of work clothes into that bag! … Not to mention an entire year´s worth of tax documents (Sigh … traveling with tax documents = not going on a vacation). It has been with me on planes, trains, buses and boats, and oh so many automobiles.
It is quite sturdy and although it is showing some wear and tear I still choose it first for every trip. I must admit, having it held together with duct tape, has made me worry on occasion that I might receive judgmental stares from fancy hotel bellhops, that it may reflect badly on me to show up with a tattered bag. But then I remember a certain blues musician I once worked with, who showed up with his favorite guitar in a beat up case wrapped three times around in duct tape. He said it kept people from stealing it (but he also mentioned it pretty much guaranteed he´d get stopped and searched at airport security).
The pros and cons of a tattered bag.
My bag is an Atlantic, it is part of a set, I don’t own the set, I only found that out when I searched online to see how much it would cost to replace it. Almost a hundred dollars. I think I won´t just yet. I´ll put some more duct tape across the bottom to repair the latest unraveling and then just use it till the wheels fall off.
Which will probably not be for another hundred thousand miles.
