Today after church I played my final La Bohème, and after getting home and changing into travel clothes my sister drove us to our hotel near SFO (Thank you, Carolyn!). We don’t always spend the night up here when on a trip, but it just worked out well to do so this time. After going to dinner, Carolyn headed home and we got settled in for the night.
I’m pretty weary and tomorrow will be a very long day, but I thought I’d at least fill readers in on the final luggage decision:
It’s roller cases this time. It just was the best way to go for this winter trip. We have our Cabin Max bags for our under the seat bags (not that they will go under this first flight’s seats since we are in Polaris). My purse can be stashed inside that bag when necessary. The roller you see in the photo that is in between our two Gregory roller bags is one that we won’t need to bring back with us. It has a few treats and surprises for people we’ll be seeing soon. So after that it’s just the two Gregory roller cases (they DO qualify for carryon and will be used that way on the flight back from Europe) and two Cabin Max bags you see there, plus Dan’s small PacSafe and my (not pictured) purse. Since we have to check that middle suitcase on our flight there we will go ahead and check the other two larger bags and enjoy a rather light load on the flight. I’m not usually in favor of checked luggage, but it just made sense to dump ‘em all off this time.
It’s funny, isn’t it? All this time I’ve been excited about my new Osprey backpack and now it’s just sitting in my closet. But I think we’ve learned something: winter means heavier clothes and means we really don’t want all that weight on our backs!
To piggyback on Patty’s comments about luggage choices, I _really_ tried to get everything into the Osprey pack plus my slightly larger Pacsafe shoulder bag. It kind of, sort of, all fit. Maybe. But the Osprey was so jam-packed full that I was concerned about a few things: wrecking my “good jacket” (for concerts, etc.), that such tight packing would be hard on pack zippers, and that it really pushed past the carry-on bag dimension limits. I know that we’d almost certainly get away with it, but “almost” could come back to bite us in some inconvenient ways.
So our fall-back setup will work pretty well, actually — especially once we drop off the big roller that is making a one-way trip to our destination. On our remaining United legs we are allowed to carry on the small rollers and the under-seat “CabinMax” bags. On one non-United connecting flight we would have had to check our Osprey packs anyway, so no change there.