Travel Day 006 – San Juan, PUERTO RICO
Initially I was supposed to leave for Miami today, but because of a Hurricane threat named Erika, I decided to stay one more day and try to figure out how to pack and travel light with my backpack…
All purged Items from my Backpack
When I had left my apartment in Boston, I ended up just stuffing way too many things into my backpack and I felt it was impossible to comfortably travel around with it. So the first thing I did was a complete inventory of my pack and I did that by spreading everything out on the bed. I had already done some pre-selections over the last couple of days, but those few items were just not enough to make a real difference…
The funny thing was that I had read all the great travel tips of hardcore backpackers before I left and they recommended such immensely useful things like cutting off the handle of the tooth-brush, cutting out the labels of clothes, shortening the unused straps of the backpack and so forth. Well, these things might save a gram, but in reality they wouldn’t make a difference and it was rather things like liquids, gels and paper that made my backpack heavy…
So the first things I sorted out where my US cell phone with charger, the mouse for my netbook, the metal tripod for my camera, a full bottle of mosquito spray since I had two of them anyway, some gel hand sanitizer and other liquids. Then I went through my zip-lock bags and tried to take something out of every single one of them. My basic rule was to lose as many duplicates as possible…
I ended up taking out a lot of medication since I basically had two full medical kits, one in my big backpack and another one in my daypack. Some socks and other clothes had to go, as well as a lot of the paper items. I had a map of Puerto Rico, a general travel book, a lot of print outs with travel recommendations and a complete travel guide for South America. After taking photos of all printouts that seemed important, I cut my travel guide into pieces and kept only the sections of the counties that I was actually going to visit. Everything else went into the bin…
The rest of the day I used to run some errands, do internet research and post things, like my cellphone, the mouse and some other documents, home. Even if this was not a glamorous travel day, it was still a very important one. After five days on the road, I had already done the first purge and a very big step towards travelling light with my backpack. So thanks to Erika, this day had become my very first Travel Sunday of the trip and I was more than happy with the days result… : )
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