What's in my Bag: Travel Edition

by Envy - 6:56 PM

On normal days my bag is full of books and notebooks for college. The books barely fit in there, but without them something just feels a little off. When I travel there is no need to take those books with me. I'm weird, but not that weird. When I travel the contents of my bag are completely different.

I use a blue backpack when I travel. It's been to Peru, Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, Luxemburg and the UK. I bought it eight years ago and it's been my loyal companion ever since. During my trip it's home to these things.

The most important thing in my bag is my camera. I call him Plum. I could've called him Carl, but Kanra's camera is called Carl already so it would only lead to confusion.
Plum is a Sony Cybershot Something Something and has a lot of megapixels. I'm terrible at remembering technical facts, but I know the most important thing: Plum takes amazing pictures - if I don't forget to take the lense cap off...

Also important: snacks. Liquorice, peppermint and Mentos are musts on my trips. These all last about five days, but that's not really a problem. After five days I just switch to whatever kind of local sweets I can get my hands on. In fact, I enjoy those even more.

I'm candy Wolverine

Then there's some important stuff: way too many tissues (my mom is a firm believer that one can never have too many tissues) and my sunglasses. Sunglasses probably don't sound very essential to everyone out there, but I wear glasses and without them I am half-blind. Because of this I also have perscription sunglasses, which are not exactly cheap. I need to keep them close at all times.

On to the fun stuff: my travel journal! Something cool happened? Time to write it down! Something weird happened? Draw it! Boring day? Look back on the illustrations I made and stories I wrote on earlier trips!
I mostly use pencils and fineliners to write in my travel journal. The fineliners also have to be here to color some countries on a certain tote bag.

I got this bag for my birthday last year and it's safe to say that I'm completely obsessed with coloring as many countries as possible. Every time I visit a new country I want to color it right away. Of course I could wait until I get back home, but it's much more fun to do so the minute you cross a border. So my tote bag goes in an ugly zip lock bag that goes into my backpack. The ugliness of the zip lock bag is the reason it's not in the big picture.

What else? Books of course! I don't think I really feel alive if I haven't read a page a day. This year I'm taking a German book with me, because I have to keep improving my German even before my junior year of college starts. Oh, and there's also a Spanish text book. What can I say? I like to learn languages.

After Plum, these things are the most important ones in my backpack. The thing on the left is a gigantic plastic envelope. I'm a hoarder: receipts, brochures, business cards, everything I can get my hands on during my travels has to come home with me for art or travel journal pages.
The big notebook is for stories that could maybe turn into novels if I had more time to write. The little one if my new blogging notebook. I write all my blogposts by hand first, so I'm using about four blogging notebooks a year. This is my latest asset. I like it because it has ice cream on the cover and come on, who doesn't like ice cream?