Let’s discuss baggage.

When I was planning this trip, I spent a lot of time researching flights. What I found was rather straightforward: the cheapest airlines currently allow roughly 10 kg of weight for a combined carry-on and personal item without costing extra.

Admittedly, there’s a lot of variation; some only weigh the carry-on (with a rough limit of 7 kg) some are measured in pounds rather than kilograms, some want to charge you for having a carry-on at all,¹ but by and large it’s all around the same basic limits.

Packing your life into 10 kg, it turns out, isn’t all that interesting a challenge. You just throw everything out. I’m travelling with a computer² and a power brick³ for it, a kindle,⁴ a cell phone,⁵ a pile of cables and converters, five shirts, two pairs of jeans, two pairs of shoes, one jacket,⁶ one wool sweater, a bathing suit and towel, flannel pants and a T-shirt,⁷ a handful of socks and underwear, and a small selection of toiletries. That’s basically it.

The total weight clocks in at 10.8 kg. That’s not ideal — there’s some minor things that kind of bump that number up (medication, the travel scale I’m using to check the weight on all this stuff), and some things I’m considering ditching like the beard trimmer.⁸ But it’s close enough I can just wear the jacket and stow a few things in my pocket and get under the weight limits.

So I’ve done a lot to tune my luggage to exactly what I need to for travel. And after all this economizing and weighing and downsizing, Ryanair turned around and lost my bag.

As with so much, this was kind of my fault. I haven’t been completely honest; while I am and do intend to travel with just a carry-on and a personal item, at the moment I’m also traveling with two 20 kg duffle bags packed to the gills with costumes and larp props. It turns out the only really travel—unfriendly hobby I have is larping, since assembling and hauling costumes across the better part of half of the globe is a pain. I’m dropping these off at a friend’s near Berlin⁹ with the idea that I’ll be heading through or around there enough that I can pick up and drop off things as needed.

This made a lot of sense before I left. It made less when I had to haul all this stuff to the airport, and even less when, dragging it across Gatwick, I pulled something in my back. By the time I finished visiting Alcester and returned to London, I was done with it, and just found someone to ship one of my bags directly to Berlin.¹⁰

What that meant was that, having already paid to carry two bags with me on the flight to Stockholm, I now only had one. On the spur of the moment, I decided to check my carry-on in my now available spot. Which Ryanair promptly lost.

This turns out to be strangely freeing. I hadn’t lost any of my electronics. I discovered my credit card includes a $100/day bag delay, and $3,000 in lost luggage insurance — far more than I actually lost. My duffle of costumes did have another couple pairs of jeans and a small collection of shirts¹¹ in it, so I wouldn’t even have needed to replace everything.

There’s something else, though. The world is filled with laudatory injunctions to Live Life Simply! and Focus On What’s Truly Meaningful!¹² so we’ve all internalized that to some extent. But getting rid of so much while packing really put that to the test, for me. In thinking about my lost luggage, I realized there was only one thing that bothered me about losing. I commissioned a wizard’s wand for an upcoming larp¹³ from a woodcarver. I had packed it in my carry-on so it wouldn’t get damaged by banging around in a duffle bag. It’s not all that expensive, but it is literally irreplaceable. That I missed. The rest could go hang.

After all that, my stay in Sweden was strangely anticlimactic. The airport called me the next day to announce they had found my bag, and I was able to pick it up on the way to the larp A Nice Evening with the Family.

I don’t have a lot to say about the game; it was very well-designed, very well-organized, and I had a lot of fun. But the design and intent is sufficiently unique¹⁴ that I’m not sure if my criticisms (which are relatively minor) are properly aimed at the style, the design, the execution, or the way I approached it. I need to think about it more. I can say that it does a fantastic job focusing on the themes it wants to, and if you’ve ever dreamed of being ground into the dirt by the patriarchy before leaving your children/killing your husband/committing suicide, have I got a game for you.

I’ve spent the last day in Stockholm, recovering. My back is almost completely recovered. I did venture into the city to eat at Max, because I’m a huge sucker for vegetarian fast food. And now I’m in the SAS lounge at Arlanda waiting for my flight to just outside Berlin, where I can drop off most of my luggage, and really start to fly.

Next: Berlin (TXL) to Vienna (VIE)
Prev: London (STN) to Stockholm (NYO)

Footnotes

¹ Like United’s “Basic Economy” fare. Don’t fly United, kids.

² 13" MacBook Pro (1.4 kg)

³ Anker USB Type-C PD Charger (0.2 kg)

⁴ (0.1 kg)

⁵ Doesn’t count against my weight limit, since it’s always in my pocket

⁶ Mountain Hardware Men’s StretchDown™ Jacket (0.5 kg)

⁷ For sleeping in, mostly

⁸ I really thought I’d be getting more use out of it, but I can honestly just pick up disposable razors on the road. If I cared. It turns out I mostly don’t.

⁹ This very next leg, in fact

¹⁰ £29, they picked up my bag at the hotel, shipped it to Germany, and delivered it to the door of the friend I’m staying with. As I write this, it’s waiting for my arrival.

¹¹ All non-costume pieces, I hasten to point out.

¹² Often coupled with someone trying to sell you a luxury vacation or a high-end sweater. I suspect you need a certain amount of money for that sales pitch to work; either you’re broke and not doing anything (in which case, you don’t need to simplify) or you’re broke and working your ass off (in which case, you can’t imagine how you’d simplify in the first place).

¹³ College of Wizardry 19. I’m the alchemy professor.

¹⁴ In short, A Nice Evening with the Family takes a number of (mostly) Scandinavian plays concerning patriarchy and the need to live up to societal expectations and runs them all together over the course of an evening. Players take a role from one of the plays. The overarching structure comes from the 1998 Danish film The Celebration.

What makes it (relatively) unique is that you’re expected to play out the character arc from your play: Nora is going to leave her husband, Hedda Gabler is going to shoot herself, Miss Julie is going to sleep with the valet but lose courage before running off with him. Your character beats are preordained, and while you could go against that, you’re not just mucking with your plotline, you’re potentially screwing up everyone else’s.