Choosing the right luggage for a trip of any length can be surprisingly stressful. So many choices, so many factors to consider. Will it fit in the overhead? Are the wheels going to break the first time I take it down a cobblestone street in Rome? Is a big old carry-on backpack comfortable?
We’ve picked out a few of our favorite pieces of luggage and backpacks. These are what we use on our travels. We’ll go over why we picked these pieces and how we use them.
Backpacks for Personal Items
Osprey Qasar Backpack – This is what I use for my under-the-seat personal item on all our flights. Generally, on a flight, I’ll just keep my camera and laptop in it. It doubles as a good daybag during hikes and bopping around the city. I’ve had this for about six years and it’s held up from my very first travels in Portugal with it, to hikes in South America and Volcano Acatenango in Guatemala, or just running around the cities of Bulgaria.
Eddie Bauer Stowaway Backpack – This is Katarain’s personal item for flights and daybag. It doesn’t have the same volume of my Osprey bag, but it is packable. You can scrunch it up pretty tiny and slip it into another bag for easy transport. It’s held up well for our long-term travels as well!
Carry-On Bags
Cotopaxi Allpa 42L Travel Bag – I really love this bag for my carry-on pack. It’s 42L fits plenty of clothes for my shorter trips. For long-term travel, I stow all my electronics (camera, laptop, Nintendo Switch, GoPro, Apple Magic Keyboard, and way more) plus a couple of changes of clothes, medicine, and all the other toiletries and things I need on a daily basis. It fits really comfortable over the back and has a good hip belt as well. You can also sling it over your shoulder with a comfy shoulder strap. I love how organized the internal pouches are as well. This is also available in a 35L travel bag if you want a smaller, easier to carry version.
Osprey Transporter 44L Carry-On Bag – Similar to Tony’s Cotopaxi bag, this is well organized. It’s got a little more volume, but doesn’t have as robust of a hip belt, but it does have a shoulder strap. Again, it’s got a well organized interior. It would be hard to choose which is our favorite between the Cotopaxi bag and this Osprey bag. But we did go through a ton of other options for carry-on bags, and these two constantly came out on top for us.
Conclusions – As you can see, we use backpacks for our carry-ons. It makes it super easy to navigate all kinds of streets and public transit. We don’t deal with wheels and they pack into the overheads of pretty much every plane we’ve taken very easily. We’ve been very happy with both these bags and would highly recommend them. Bonus, if you want to know more about why we usually go carry-on only for traveling, check out our post here.
Check-In Suitcases
DELSEY PARIS Checked Luggage – We had a hard time choosing the right checked in baggage. We usually didn’t check baggage until 2021 when we started our extended multi-year traveling adventure. So we needed something that balanced weight (lower the better, of course) with volume (how much can we pack in this boy) and durability (is it gonna break??). We’ve put our DELSEY Paris bags through the ringer. But they continuously put up with the abuse of rolling them over rocky streets and particularly rough baggage handlers at the airports. These compromise both in durability and weight. We tried to find the lightest suitcase we could with the most volume that would still fit within the dimension specifications of checked-in baggage for most airlines (Always check those weight and dimension specs with your airlines so you avoid crazy fees!).