Travelling Light for the Last Concert

The last days of my time in Europe was topped off with a single concert that survived from a longer tour schedule (the start of the tour survived, but there was a bit of a gap and a single concert at the end!). It meant that we had a pretty whiplash travel schedule, with a total away time of around 18 hours or so, from take-off to concert through to return arrival!

Needless to say, that meant that I had an opportunity to pack extremely light for the night away! No check in bags meant that there needed to be some little tweaks to manage liquids/toothpaste, but all of it ended up working.

So, what did I need to pack? Of course, there was the viola in the double case... and having one side of the double case empty (the violin portion) meant that I could carry the music inside the case as well as my concert pants and shirt in the cavity that the violin would have otherwise occupied. Meanwhile, I wore a jumper and a dinner jacket (black for the concert) under my coat to save space in the on board carry bags. It always looks a bit funny when I do that... but I'm not really one for fashion style. It is purely functional, I need to take a concert jacket, and it won't fit in the back... so I wear it! It makes me look like a RPG min/maxer in real life!

With KLM, you have the ability to take on board one "large" bag and one "small" bag... and in my case, the instrument case is always the "large" allowance and my trusty Timbuk2 bag is the "little" one. That said, you can fit quite a fair bit of stuff in this bag!

My huge Anker battery for USB appliances along with my XMG laptop (plus charger) were the main electrical items and all of these fitted in one of the many many pockets that the Timbuk2 bag has. So, that left me with more than enough space in the main compartment of the bag for my concert shoes (in the green pouch) and my change of underwear... plus some emergency food and some lunch that I had picked up at the Madrid airport.

Emergency food is something that I now lug around with me always... normally, it isn't anything more grand than a handful of muesli bars or something like that that can just keep me going for a skipped meal. It is a lesson that I had learnt the hard way a long time ago... I was arriving to a small town in Italy, late at night... and it turned out that EVERYTHING in the town was closed... no restaurants, no supermarket... nothing. There was no food, and I had missed dinner to catch a very tight train connection. I was very hungry that night... and it ended up being a very very long night! Thankfully, that is a bit of a first-world problem... there are places in the world where that isn't such an abnormal event, and I'm glad to have rarely suffered that experience.

The rest of the stuff in the main compartment was a toothbrush and some soap (no hair washing for a single night travel!). I wasn't sure about bringing a tube of toothpaste on board... I've had some security people have no problem with it, and others who zealously throw out everything. So, instead... I found a little used jam jar (the single jam shot that hotels have) that my kids were using in their toy kitchen. It wasn't going to be shipped out with our stuff, so it was going to be in the trash anyway... and I filled it with a bit of toothpaste, enough for a few brushes (always have some redundancy!).

So... that was my packing for a 18 hour work trip! In the end, carrying a battery meant that I could forego the multi-charger that I normally take on these trips.

I don't normally travel this light.. there is always a check-in bag that needs to go with me. I do envy those who don't have to use their "large" onboard allowance to lug a violin/viola around with them. It is a real luxury that I don't often experience, just to waltz off the plane and straight out of the arrivals hall without needing to hang around waiting for bags! I do wish that I could do that more often... but it did feel like I was missing something!