I once wrote a travel essentials page that confessed to taking an Instant Pot, a sous vide cooker, a bag of sous vide balls, and a salad bowl to hotels.
Yes, really.
I called it my portable kitchen. I also admitted that the equipment list I shared was shorter than the real one, partly because I did not want to alarm anyone into staging an intervention.
Anyone who travelled to conferences or conventions with me in that chapter would have known I was serious.
There was a reason behind the luggage
Food planning mattered to me. If I did not have a good meal planned, I could spend an entire meeting thinking about what I was going to eat next.
Preparing for meals was one way I tried to stay present for the thing I had actually travelled to do. The kitchen equipment looked like a lot, because it was a lot. But it had a purpose.
My old packing lists were built around those hotel stays and busy meeting schedules. They were a record of how I managed that particular kind of travel.
An old list is a snapshot
That is what strikes me when I read the page now. A travel essentials list tells you about more than the contents of someone’s suitcase. It tells you what kind of days they were preparing for.
There were pre-planned outfits for early mornings, toiletries that stayed together between trips, and equipment for meals. I was trying to do some of the thinking at home so that I had less to sort out when I arrived.
I’m a minimalist traveller now. The portable kitchen belongs to an earlier chapter, but I don’t need to pretend it never happened.
The useful question is whether the thing you are carrying helps with the journey you are actually taking. An old list cannot answer that for every new trip.
Mine certainly should not be treated as a current shopping list. It is a slightly excessive, entirely sincere glimpse of how I used to travel.
And yes, I really did pack the salad bowl.
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