I have a problem: I always pack too much underwear. This may seem like a strange problem to someone who doesn’t travel much (or maybe even to people who do), but I seriously can never decide how much underwear to pack, and end up over-packing! On my last trip to Asia, I definitely packed wayyy too much, and every bit matters when you’re carrying everything on you back for 6 weeks.
Reed Kennedy (Pack Like A Nerd) finally has a solution to this, since he took notes on his last 17-day trip and had his friend Carrie make a graph out of it! The chart helps you pick the perfect number of pairs of underwear considering the number of days you’ll be away and the number of times you plan on washing. Gold numbers are considered to be a perfect run, meaning that you will be wearing your last pair of clean underwear when you arrive at home.
Thanks to Sara for providing this guide to packing in general in the comments!
This is brilliant! I will definitely be using this for my next long trip!
Glad that others have this problem too 😛
I like this… for long trips where you’ll be doing laundry, it’s important to think about cycling everything. You want to run out of clothes on the days when you are planning on watching clothes. Of course, you want to make sure that you run out of EVERYTHING on the same day. If you have six t-shirts, but only three pairs of underwear, you’re wasting space!
I managed to get away with only doing laundry once on my 6-week trip to Asia… which definitely meant that I overpacked 😛
I also found this article useful for packing things other than underwear (which I may never learn to not overpack!) http://r29.co/10qCcWZ
Thanks! I’ll add that to the post too!