I used to travel a lot. I mean, A LOT. In 2019, I was away from home for 16 weeks. 

From October – December in 2019 I visited Seattle, Hamburg, Salem (Oregon), Cologne, Iceland, Anchorage, Brussels, Paris, and then back to Cologne. One of those was vacation, but the rest were work trips of about a week each.

2020 was going to have just as busy a schedule as I had seven trips planned in the first six months. (I got to take just one of those trips – to College Station, Texas.)

One of the things I was constantly trying to decide was: Do I check a bag or not? On the one hand, there is a lot more freedom in not checking a bag. (The longest nine minutes of every international journey are the ones I spend at international arrivals in Dulles Airport waiting for my bag to hit the conveyor belt.) On the other hand, it is a horrible feeling to be in a hotel room and realize I didn’t get my underwear into the bag before I closed it up. 

I bought a super backpack that would allow me to not check a bag. I made a GoogleKeep list for trips of 3-days, 5-days and 7-days to be sure the underwear incident never happened again. I bought tons of little containers to be sure that I would have all my toiletries. I taught myself I didn’t need to have a full clean outfit for every day. I started doing laundry in hotel rooms and mastered using an iron (oh horrors) to refresh clothes.

(Engineers don’t really look at each other anyway, but we can smell each other and usually comment on it.)

But, when was it ok to check a bag? I came up with an algorithm. I decided if I were going to be gone over seven nights, it would be ok to check a bag. What I found on these longer trips is that that the amount of stuff I took with me that I “absolutely needed” always expanded to fill the bag. If I took my backpack and briefcase, they were bulging at the seams. If I took my briefcase and carry-on roller bag, I always had to use the “expand” zipper to get it to close.

(Please note that carry-on roller bag is misleading. The ones you see in stores differ in size by an inch or two and most of them are not allowed on international flights in the cabin. Maybe they should write a standard?)

If I went the whole way and took a full-size suitcase, suddenly I needed four pairs of shoes for three days of meetings. 

I still don’t really have an answer about when it is right to check a bag. What I do know is the road less travelled is generally the one you wished you had picked. When I don’t check a bag, I wish I had. When I do check a bag, I wish I hadn’t.

Last night, Husband and I discussed if we should go somewhere before the schools decided to give face-to-face learning a try again. (All signs point to this happening in late February or March for us.) So, for the first time in a long time I found myself checking out flights and hotels and availability. Part of the new normal includes checking out COVID travel rules for the airline, the hotel, the destination, and the return to the US. In the end, we decided this is not the right time to take a trip, but I wonder…

Is that so I didn’t have to ask the question: Do I check a bag or not?