The journey begins long before the boarding pass.
There was a time when preparing for an overseas trip meant turning the dining room table into a temporary travel office. Passports, airline tickets, travel insurance, hotel vouchers, rail passes, travellers’ cheques and foreign currency all had their designated places. Then came the photocopies—triplicate, naturally. One set in the handbag, another in the carry-on and a third in the checked suitcase.
Raise your hand if you travelled internationally in the 1980s (or earlier). You know exactly what I’m talking about. The logic was impeccable. If one bag disappeared, another would save the day. Somewhere along the way, we all became amateur archivists, convinced that the success of an overseas journey depended on producing precisely the right piece of paper at exactly the right moment.
I remember watching my parents prepare for international travel, and even their professions revealed themselves in the way they packed.
My father, a mechanical engineer, approached every journey the way he approached every project- with a system. Long before the internet, he researched destinations, bought guidebooks, studied maps and assembled information with meticulous care. He travelled with two handwritten checklists: one tucked inside his suitcase and an identical copy in his hand luggage. Every document, every item of clothing and every travel essential was carefully ticked off before departure. Those checklists weren’t signs of anxiety; they were engineering. The objective was simple: once the journey began, nothing important should require another thought.
My mother, a nurse, worked from an entirely different operating system. Her packing wasn’t driven by checklists so much as contingency planning and disaster management. If someone developed a headache, there was medicine for it. If someone caught a cold, she had packed for that. If the weather changed unexpectedly, there was another layer somewhere in the suitcase. Snacks were considered an essential food group and always featured prominently. She wasn’t particularly interested in guidebooks, maps or departure times. The destination had a way of taking care of itself.
In fact, one of my favourite family travel stories began before we had even left the ground. My mother and I once missed a flight to Panama because the ticket showed a departure time of 04:30. She looked at it, nodded confidently and assumed that meant half past four in the afternoon. The airline, rather less imaginatively, meant half past four in the morning.
Needless to say, my parents never packed each other’s suitcases. Each remained quietly convinced that their own system was the sensible one. As I prepared for my own journey this summer, I realised the dining room table looked remarkably empty. There were no bulging folders, no neatly stacked confirmations and certainly no emergency photocopies. Almost everything I needed for a journey across three countries was sitting inside a device that slips comfortably into my pocket.
Preparing for travel used to mean packing. This time, it felt more like creating an installation.
Not an art installation in the gallery sense—although, by the time I had finished arranging transport, digital identity, insurance, maps, payments, reading, writing, communications and backup power, I was beginning to think it qualified. Contemporary art often asks us to suspend disbelief. So, apparently, does modern travel.
Before I had folded a single blouse, I assembled an invisible ecosystem designed to carry me across borders with little more than a few taps, a QR code and a charged battery.
Travel used to mean packing a suitcase. Now it means curating a digital installation. Like any good installation, the individual pieces are interesting enough on their own. The real magic lies in how they work together.
The journey itself went through countless revisions. Routes were reconsidered, connections refined and costs recalculated until the final version emerged as the best balance between convenience, flexibility and budget. Somewhere during that process I realised I was no longer simply planning a trip. I was designing a system.
That system extends far beyond my phone. Travel insurance can be activated in seconds. Roaming takes care of itself. Public transport increasingly accepts contactless payment without dedicated travel cards or paper tickets. Navigation, banking, transport and digital wallets communicate seamlessly with one another, reducing not only paperwork but something far more valuable: mental load. By the time I leave home, most of the logistical thinking has already been done.
Packing itself has become an exercise in intentionality. Everything must fit into a single carry-on compression backpack. Three tops. Three bottoms. Two layering pieces. A jacket. Spare shoes. Minimal toiletries. Camera equipment. The wardrobe occupies surprisingly little space.
The electronics, however, appear to be preparing for their own expedition.
Alongside the essentials travel a watch, earbuds, an e-reader, a camera, enough backup battery capacity to survive multiple delays and even a small rechargeable vacuum pump for the compression bags.
I no longer travel with a document folder. I travel with enough battery capacity to keep a small village online.
Ironically, the clothes are the easy part. The real packing challenge isn’t deciding which shirt to leave behind. It’s remembering every charging cable.
The compression bags itself aren’t new. Earlier this year they accompanied me to Valencia, which in hindsight, was a dress rehearsal. The backpack mode snd compression bags were tested. The camera workflow, capsule wardrobe and even the small cross-body pouch earned its place, carrying the passport, phone, wallet and earbuds everywhere except the few moments it had to disappear into the backpack while passing through airport security.
The journey next week isn’t Version 1.0. It’s the software update. Perhaps that’s what has changed most about travel. We spend less time wondering whether we’ve packed enough socks and more time wondering whether we’ve packed every cable. I used to worry about forgetting my passport. Now I worry about forgetting a charging cable.
The irony, of course, is that the passport is still in my bag. Without a charged phone, however, I cannot prove I have a boarding pass, transport tickets, travel insurance, accommodation, an entry permit or, quite possibly, my own identity.
As I packed, I found myself thinking about my parents. Their professions shaped the way they travelled, just as the technology of my own time has shaped mine. My father’s checklists and meticulous research were his operating system. My mother’s contingency planning and well-stocked emergency kit were hers. Mine happens to be digital.
The tools have changed. The objective hasn’t. We all aspire to begin the journey with the confidence that, once we step out of the front door, we can stop worrying about logistics and start enjoying the adventure. Every generation travels with the tools of its time. Mine just happens to need charging.
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