Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need Read Free Page B

smaller than a standard clarinet case, this incredible unit, thanks to advanced luggage technology, can easily hold:
Eight men’s suits OR
14 women’s full-length evening gowns PLUS
All the shirts, socks, ties, underwear, and clothing accessories you would need for two terms in Congress PLUS
All your toiletries PLUS
An actual working toilet
    And that’s not all! How many times have you said to yourself, as a busy business traveler:
    “Why can’t they design a carry-on bag with a space for my tennis rackets, golf clubs, skis, and volleyball equipment?” Well, look no farther, because the Laser 3000X …
    And so on. Ordinarily you would take one look at this kind of advertisement and say, hey, get
serious
. But in the airplane environment, where you have nothing else to do except watch the movie, 10 you find yourself reading all the way through it, and by the time you’re on your third Bloody Mary, and you’ve reached the part where the advertisement claims that this suitcase will do your tax returns for you, you’re thinking, “Hey! This could be the answer to my luggage needs!” So you whip out your Visa or MasterCard and fill out the order form, and six to ten weeks later you receive: a bag with a handle. A
small
bag with a handle. Which, if you really pack it right, will hold two pairs of socks PLUS your dental floss. I know what I’m talking about! I have seventeen of these things!
HOW MUCH LUGGAGE YOU CAN CARRY ON A COMMERCIAL AIRLINE PLIGHT
    Federal Airline Administration regulations state that each passenger may have up to 17,000 poundsof carry-on luggage
provided that he or she can jam it all into the overhead baggage compartment
. I am a veteran traveler, but I am still amazed at how much stuff some people will try to get up there. Entire households, sometimes. These people are always directly in front of me.
    “What do you mean, I can’t carry this on?!” they’ll say to the airline personnel. “I ALWAYS carry this on!”
    “Sir,” the airline personnel will say, “that’s a
lawn tractor.”
    “But look!” the person will say. “It fits in the overhead baggage compartment!”
    And the person will actually attempt to shove it in there, which is of course impossible because (a) the tractor is too large, and (b) the compartment already contains some other passenger’s upright piano. But this will not stop the person from trying. No human emotion is more powerful than the grim determination of an airline passenger attempting to shove an inappropriate object into the overhead baggage compartment.
WHAT TO PACK
    There are two major schools of thought on how to pack for traveling. These are known technically as “my school” and “my wife’s school.”
    My school of packing is that you should never carry more things than you can fit into a standard sandwich bag. This way you never put yourselfin a position where you have to turn your belongings over to a commercial airline’s crack Luggage Hiding Department (traces of airline luggage have been found on Mars). So I travel very light, and I’ve found that this is really not a problem, once I get adjusted to the stench resulting from wearing the same shirts and socks and, of course, underwear for as long as two weeks running. The advantage of this is that I get plenty of room to stretch out on airplanes, because nobody will sit near me. The disadvantage is that the flight attendants also stay away, preferring to serve my dinner entree by flipping it at me Frisbee-style from as far as 25 feet away, and some of those airline entrees 11 are hard enough to kill a person.
    My wife, on the other hand, would not think of leaving the house for even a half hour without sufficient possessions in her purse alone to establish a comfortable wilderness homestead. So when we travel, she packs many, many items. She buys these giant suitcases, manufactured by shipbuilders, and she packs them with items for every conceivable contingency. Like, if we’re going