By Lauren Juliff
Student Travel Expert, about.com
I've written previously about avoiding travel gimmicks, and that often, things you're always recommended to carry are actually quite unnecessary once you're actually out on the road. One of the items I believed to be useless were packing cubes.
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What Are Packing Cubes?
Packing
cubes are essentially small bags that are designed to help keep your
backpack organized as you travel. You can find them in all different
shapes and sizes, designed to carry everything from clothing to cables
to toiletries to medication.
What Are The Advantages?
Organization
is a huge advantage. If you ever need to find something from your
backpack, you'll know exactly where you can find it without having to
rummage through your pack for ten minutes only to find it nestled at the
bottom of your bag.
Unpacking and repacking your backpack is
made so much easier, too. You can simply pull out your packing cubes
from your bag and have everything you need to hand, without having your
clothes strewn all across the room.
Packing your bag will take five minutes instead
of an hour as you can simply roll everything up into the cubes and pack
them neatly on top of each other.
Any Disadvantages?
If
you have a top loading backpack instead of a front loading pack, be
sure to choose your packing cubes carefully. Depending on the width of
your backpack, some packing cubes may be too wide to fit easily in your
bag.
[post_ads]My Experience With Packing Cubes
After
deciding that packing cubes didn't offer any real advantage, I
struggled through a year of disorganized unpacking and repacking on the
road. Somehow, the very thing I needed would always manage to work its
way to the bottom of my backpack, leaving me with a huge mess to clean
up afterwards. Even if you try to pack as light as possible, it's still hard to keep track of where everything is.
While
planning for a big, multi-month road trip and deciding that I'd much
rather keep my backpack in the trunk of the car and carry only what I
needed into my hostel each day, I invested in a couple of packing cubes.
I used one of the packing cubes to carry all of my shorts and pants and
the other to carry my t-shirts.
It was a revelation when I
discovered just how convenient packing cubes were. I was saving so much
time that I'd usually spend frantically searching through my backpack
whenever I needed to find something.
With the road trip over, I
decided to continue traveling with the packing cubes to see if there
were any benefits to backpacking with them.
It took less than a
month for me to decide that packing cubes were going to become a
permanent fixture in my backpack. Packing and unpacking takes less than
half the time it used to, I always know where everything is in my bag
and I even seem to have more space in my backpack for souvenirs!
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Packing
cubes have made such a difference to the way I travel and I can
wholeheartedly recommend picking up a couple before you leave to travel.
I recommend checking out the packing cubes offered by EagleCreek -- they're tough, come in many different sizes and receive great reviews.
