For two highly organised people, Rich and I haven’t exactly been overly prepared for our round the world adventure but this trip came something out of the blue and with only a 40 litre backpack each to use for the year ahead (out of choice, not necessity), we don’t have a lot of room to plan to take many things with us!

We really like the challenge of taking carry on luggage only for our year long trip. Mainly because we don’t want to carry around a heavy bag but also because it is cheaper not to check luggage, it’s less likely to get lost in transfers (of which we’ll have a few) and we are hoping it will be more secure, never needing to put our backpacks in storage compartments underneath buses or on the roof of them.

Rather stupidly we only tried our first pack the night before we headed off, not leaving much time to think about how to get the inevitable overweight bags within the cabin baggage weight limits, which are usually around 10kg.

“Great I thought, however Turkish airlines only allow 8kg for carry on luggage!”

The first pack of our backpacks went quite well, with each bag weighing 10kg, great I thought, however Turkish airlines (our airline carrier to Cape Town) only allow 8kg for carry on luggage! So we decided to bring our rain coats travelling which have massive pockets. We had originally discarded bringing these due to the weight of them but the amount of weight they could carry far outweighed the amount they weighed, so they became a travelling necessity for us.

Rich got both our liquid carry on bags in each of his pockets, whilst I packed lots of our electrical things in mine (it’s amazing how much a few wires and small gadgets can weigh!) This along with removing a pair of shorts each and a couple of tops and packing as much as possible into our ‘personal items,’ my hand bag and the laptop case, we managed to get our backpacks down to 8kg – genius!

“If we don’t have it now, we’ll just have to buy it”

We set off for Birmingham airport on Thursday 30th October 2014 with Rich having that sinking feeling that we’d forgotten something. If we don’t have it now, we’ll just have to buy it I said and with that we knew that there was no going back.