Not a gear list in the aspirational sense. This is the actual contents of a 38-litre bag that has been packed and unpacked perhaps a hundred times, with the things I have stopped carrying noted at the end.
Clothes
Three t-shirts, one long-sleeve, one shirt with a collar for the occasions that require one. Two trousers, one shorts. Four pairs of socks and underwear. A light down jacket that compresses to nothing and has been worth its weight every single trip. The coat, if the season demands it, worn rather than packed.
One pair of shoes on my feet, one pair of sandals in the bag. That is the whole footwear situation and it has never once been a problem.
The rest
- Laptop, charger, a short multi-country adapter. I work while travelling; this is non-negotiable weight.
- A paper notebook and two pens.
- One book. Only ever one, chosen carefully, because abandoning it at page ninety in a town with no bookshop is genuinely bleak.
- A small dry bag. Cheap, weighs nothing, has saved the laptop twice.
- Earplugs, eye mask, a length of paracord for drying clothes.
- Basic medicine: rehydration salts, painkillers, plasters, and the antibiotics my doctor insists on.
- A photocopy of the passport page and a spare bank card, kept apart from the originals, for the reasons in the border post.
What I stopped carrying
A camera, because I used it four times in a year and the phone is adequate. A travel towel, because every pension has towels. A padlock. A water filter, which was genuinely useful on one trip in 2019 and has been dead weight on every trip since, because I have not been anywhere in six years where the tap was a problem.
The pattern in all four: I was packing for a trip I had read about rather than the trips I actually take.