The Travelite® FAQ

In general, my mantra is “If you don’t need it, leave it home.” Once in a while, though, I make an exception because the item makes life so much easier.

One such item is the travel tray. They aren’t particularly popular items at travel supply stores so you might have trouble finding them, but you do occasionally run into them in unexpected places. The best one I got was a brown Hello Kitty travel tray for $1 at the dollar store in the San Francisco Japantown a few years ago (OK, so it’s Hello Kitty… but how can you beat a buck?).

Mall store Brookstone offers a no-frills travel tray. Photo courtesy Brookstone.

What makes these travel trays OK in my book is that when not in use, they’re just completely flat, like a sheet of cardboard. To use it, you pinch the corners together and snap the buttons together, and now you have a little tray.

Maxpedition, an online store that sells a lot of rugged gear, also sells a travel tray. Unlike the one from Brookstone, this one even includes a little pouch on one side for your small items, like rings. Photo courtesy of Maxpedition.com.

Why is a travel tray so convenient that I actually think it’s OK to pack? Because it helps you keep all your stuff together in one place when you get back to your hotel room! Your wallet, your cell phone, your car keys, your hotel key card…

While you might have a place for everything when you’re home (and not even think about it when you go to grab them), staying at a hotel means things aren’t at their ordinary places. It would be so easy to misplace things.

I’ve gone so far as to keep my cell phone in the travel tray while getting it charged!

Fortunately, once you unsnap the corners, these travel trays are pretty travelite-friendly. Just slide them into the side of your carry-on and you’ll barely notice it’s there.

A lot of artists like to take their art supplies with them when they travel. For some, the joy they get from creating art on the road more than makes up for the inconvenience of lugging all of their supplies. For others, they come up with creative ways to lighten their load, carrying fewer things and packing everything into a very portable artist kit.

And then there are people like me. As much as I like to draw, my work more closely resembles doodles, and it’s rarely worth my trouble to pack any meaningful art supplies. Usually, the most I take with me might be a pocket sketchbook, a Sharpie pen, a mechanical pencil, and an eraser. Sometimes I take more, sometimes less.

However, I recently discovered a great little item that I’ve since incorporated as a regular item in my mini art kit: the Pentel 8-Color Pencil.

The Pentel 8-Color Pencil

If you’ve ever come across a “stacking crayon,” you know how convenient those things are. There are a couple of different styles, but they all provide multiple colors of crayon tips that snap into a single pen holder, giving you a complete palette in a tiny bit of space.

Various types of stacking crayons for kids. Photo courtesy of P-Wholesale.com.

The biggest issue with these is that they are designed primarily for kids to play around with. So the crayon quality is rather poor. Add to that, the fact that these mechanical crayon pencils only offer TIPS of each color; once you’ve drawn a picture or two, you’ve run out of color.

The Pentel 8-Color Pencil is completely different from these kid’s toys. It’s a mechanical pencil that has eight slots, with each housing a different color lead the length of a regular mechanical pencil lead. On top of that, the slots are refillable; you can buy lead refills for this pencil, just like you can for regular mechanical pencils.

If you’ve ever used a multi-point retractable pen (like the iconic Big 4-color ballpoint pen, or the more recent offerings from companies like Pilot and Uniball), the Pentel 8-Color Pencil works exactly the same way.

The 8-Color Pencil isn’t too heavy, although there is enough heft to it that you feel like you are drawing with a real instrument. There is no pen cap, since this is a retractable. To release lead out from the tip, just press down on the top button. The lead doesn’t feed down in measured segments like some mechanical pencils; holding down the top button just releases the lead, so you will want to be ready to catch it to prevent the whole thing from sliding out.

The colored leads feel pretty good. They feel a little softer than regular colored pencil lead, but they don’t feel at all mushy like crayon lead feels. The lead is each 2.0mm thick, which draws pretty thick lines. In fact, this actually makes a pretty good highlighter marker, esp with some of the lighter colors like yellow and pink. It might actually be better than pen highlighter markers on glossy surfaces, since the pencil wouldn’t cause any ink bleed.

If you’ve always wanted to sit down and sketch a scene during your travels but never wanted to bother with taking a box of colored pencils, this is the item to get.

The only down side? It’s a little pricey. Pentel sells it online for $24.48, although you can look around online (including eBay) and save a few bucks.

8-Color Pencil Model PH158
2.00mm pencil lead in red, blue, brown, orange, yellow, light green, pink, and light blue. Refillable with Pentel CH2 lead.

Available directly from Pentel for $24.84 or from Amazon for under $20.

Manufactured by Pentel

I hadn’t reviewed the iPad for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t personally have one. And secondly, there’s a ton of reviews online for the iPad. Recently, however, a friend of mine spent three weeks visiting Vietnam and Singapore with his wife. I knew he was taking his new iPad 3G with him, so when he came back, I asked him what his experience was like. I specifically wanted to know, based on his experience, whether an iPad is a friend to the traveliter, or just an extra gadget you don’t really need.

Since this trip was half-pleasure and half-work, my friend Dmitri was a little apprehensive about how it would withstand his business needs. Not all applications that he normally uses on his computer have an exact complement on the iPad (he gives the word processor as an example of an app that isn’t perfect), but because only half his trip was work-related, he was willing to set his requirements lower—the iPad’s form factor won out for him, especially after he decided to spend extra for an overseas connectivity plan through AT&T (he chose the 100MB plan for $119.99, although there are others).

One big difference for Dmitri was that while he traveled everywhere with his laptop, he always had to find a safe place to stash it in his hotel room. With the iPad, he discovered that he could put it in his daypack and take it with him everywhere. In the past, when he took his laptop with him during the day, he would carry a laptop case, which after packing power adapters and various cables, didn’t allow enough room to use as a regular daypack.

On one of the days, his iPad came in handy when his wife wanted a massage. “We had no idea where to find a good massage. All the signs are in Vietnamese, and we had no idea where to start,” he said. They finally decided to use the iPad. “I typed in ‘massage’ in Google Maps, and up popped seven or eight different massage places nearby. We would’ve never found them on our own.” His wife got a really good massage “for a fraction of what we’d pay at home,” he said.

Dmitri quickly checks his iPad to find out the latest information about World Cup soccer.

A soccer fan, Dmitri also found it very easy to keep tabs on how the different teams were doing in the World Cup throughout the day. On one such break while he was traveling with his tour group, he decided to call home to California to see how his kids (who were staying with relatives) were doing. Instead of renting an international cell phone, Dmitri just used Skype on his iPad and made the call for free. He asked his tourmates if anyone else wanted to call home… and between the novelty of using an iPad to talk on the phone, and being assured that the calls were free, everyone in his tour took turns talking to their families back home. “There was one Scottish guy on the tour who didn’t even know what an iPad was,” he said. “We finally talked him into giving it a try, so he called his mum back home. And his mother couldn’t believe her son was phoning all the way from Vietnam—it was great!”

For their Singapore portion of the trip, the iPad became a convenient business tool. Dmitri had to give a presentation, and instead of lugging his laptop with a PowerPoint presentation, he purchased Apple’s Keynote app for the iPad for $10. Keynote, which converts PowerPoint presentations, also allows uses to create PowerPoint-type presentations right on the iPad. The only drawback with Keynote, he said, was that the current version blanks out the iPad screen when you project your presentation onto a larger screen. This means that the person giving the presentation has to periodically look up to see what’s being projected.

For Dmitri, the iPad wasn’t as good for taking notes. For that, he said, he just used paper. He could see a laptop as necessary for some business travel; some companies use proprietary software that only works on some operating systems, while some people need very robust business software (like spreadsheets or databases) and actually crunch their numbers during their business trips. But for most everything else—Web, e-mail, generic business tasks—he found the iPad to be superior for his work needs. And the simple fact that he didn’t need to carry a separate laptop bag made travel that much easier.

Dmitri found that his iPad was excellent for self-entertainment. Although he owns an Amazon Kindle book reader, he downloaded the Kindle app for his iPad, and left his Kindle device at home for this trip. “I’m currently reading The Passage (a New York Times bestseller about vampires, by Justin Cronin),” he said. “It’s roughly 800-pages long, but it’s no problem carrying it in the iPad using the Kindle app.” For this trip, he also downloaded episodes of the TV show Dollhouse, as well as some movies, music, and games. In the past, Dmitri had to juggle carrying all sorts of things on trips while still trying to pare down his belongings to minimize his luggage. For this trip, he fitted everything into his iPad.

Battery life was not a problem for him, even though he faced 15-hour flights and 20-hour transits for this trip. “I watched a couple of movies, some TV shows on the flights,” Dmitri said. When he was ready for a nap, he would turn on some music and nod off while wearing his noise-cancelling headphones, and his iPad still didn’t run out of battery. “We found that it took longer to charge the iPad than the iPhone, so we always charged the iPad overnight,” he said.

Although Dmitri would recommend the iPad, he agrees it’s not necessary for everyone. He said, “If you’re a guy and you don’t carry a bag at all, a smartphone like an iPhone is OK, since you can still do a lot of the same things.” However, he noted, “I would recommend the iPad for anyone who carries a daypack during the day. The iPad is so light; lighter weight with less bulk. I was able to take everything in my daypack, including water, sun hat, snacks, travel pillow… in addition to my iPad.”

After looking at over 70 cases online, he finally chose the official Apple iPad case. “I found that the simple one was the best,” he said, noting that the sleek case was small enough to easily slip into his daypack.

Dmitri and his daughter play a game of Plants vs. Zombies together on the iPad.

After using his iPad at home (playing Plants Vs. Zombies with his young daughter) and taking it on his overseas vacation, Dmitri calls the iPad “an infinite Swiss Army Knife.” Easier, better, and more convenient than a laptop or even a netbook, the best thing about the iPad, he says, is that it is most useful when you don’t expect it. “It’s when you don’t know something, when you’re disoriented, that it comes in handy,” he said.

If you’re like me, you take a small list of items in your carry-on that most travelers don’t bother packing. Whether your handy item is a diaper pin (to pin your sweater on the seatback in front of you on the plane or to pin your ID tag inside your carry-on) or a small container of baby powder (to keep your feet from feeling too sweaty when it’s hot, or lessen the greasy-haired look if you can’t get to a shower for another day), these small items take up very little room but can be very handy and have multiple uses.

One of those really handy items is a roll of adhesive cello tape. Most of us are most familiar with the Scotch brand. Scotch tape can be immensely helpful when traveling. Besides keeping paperwork together when you don’t have a stapler, you can use strips of these as a lint remover, cover up a small cut when you don’t have a bandage, prevent a snag in your clothes from getting worse, provide endless entertainment for a toddler on a plane, and so on.

Honestly, the only inconvenience about a roll of Scotch tape has been its dispenser. The zig-zagged edge made cutting the tape handy, but the cutting end stuck out, and took up a lot of space; space you don’t want to give up when you’re traveling with just your carry-on.

Manufacturer 3M has come to the traveler’s rescue with a brand new Scotch tape dispenser in the form of a plastic donut.

Scotch Magic Tape in a donut dispenser

A quick glance shows an obvious difference to a regular tape dispenser. This is a completely enclosed, round plastic donut with no extraneous parts.

A traditional dispenser (left) next to the new Donut dispenser.

The convenience for travelers is that the donut dispenser can be tossed into your carry-on, but can also just as easily get tethered to your bag  using a short string or bead chain. As an added convenience, having a brightly colored plastic ring on your carry-on gives you a quick and easy way to identify your bag as yours.

You’re probably looking at this donut dispenser and wondering how the dispenser actually works. Is it just a plastic ring with tape inside, that you have to untwist to get to? Nothing so difficult. If you look closely, you see a white tab on the dispenser. That’s the opening. On the top of the white tab on both sides are two little round nubs of plastic, which you flick to open the tab. The tab itself is hinged, so when you flick the tab open, the little jaw opens up and shows up a peek into the inside of the dispenser.

Inside, is a standard roll of Scotch tape with the familiar green checkerboard bit of tape that indicates the start of the roll. The plastic dispenser consists of two halves of a donut; just wiggle it a bit and pull the two halves open. Once you open the halves, just pull the starter tape out and pull it onto the white tab. Close the halves up again, and you’re set to go.

The white tab acts as the dispensing portion of the donut.

Whenever you want to use some tape, just open the white hinged tab. Pull out whatever amount of tape you want, cut it on the jagged edge of the white tab, then snap the white tab shut and you’re good to go. The white tab snaps into place and will not come open on its own, but it can be easily unsnapped and unhinged with one thumb or finger.

You’ll read some negative reviews of this product online, but it looks like people get frustrated by overthinking this product. Some people aren’t happy that you have to fold the tape away before you close the tab, some people aren’t happy with the smaller roll of tape it comes with. The thing is, you don’t need to do anything with the tape before you shut the lid. The tape end stays stuck right on the teeth of the white tab, and the extra tape just folds over naturally when you shut the tab.

Once you're done with your tape, just snap the white tab shut.

The best thing about this new donut dispenser is that it’s refillable with a standard sized roll of tape (of either the 1/2 or 3/4 inch variety); no need to find special tape for this dispenser.

Scotch sells a number of other special dispensers, including pre-cut pop-up tape dispensers. I’m not too keen on that one because, although it’s handy, it limits the length of tape you dispense at a time, and inch-for-inch, costs considerably more than a regular refill roll of tape.

The Scotch Magic Tape with Donut Dispenser comes with a roll of 300-inch tape. If you plan on using this a lot on your trip, you might consider swapping it out with your own larger refill roll. The dispenser comes in a variety of bright colors (purple, turquoise, lime green, pink, red), and you can buy it at most office supply stores for a few bucks. If you have trouble finding this at your store (in my experience, these seem to sell out often), pick one up online at Amazon, Office Depot, or any number of online stores.

One of the inevitable activities you wind up participating in when you pack lightly is washing your clothes (if nothing else, your underwear). Oh sure, you can use the hotel bar soap and wash your undergarments by hand in the bathroom sink, but what do you do when you actually want to wash most of your clothes? Find the nearest laundromat? Use the expensive hotel laundry service? Both are viable options depending on your budget and time, but I’ve come across a product recently that has become a staple in my packing list: Charlie’s Soap.

The standard sack of Charlie’s Soap come with 2.64 pounds, which cleans a whopping 80 loads. Each sack is a reusable sack with a string tie, and comes with a green plastic measuring spoon. Image by Lani Teshima.

Charlie’s Soap advertises itself as being safe, non-toxic, fragrance-free, biodegradable, hypoallergenic, and most impressively, only requires a single tablespoon for a full load in the washing machine. And because it also rinses completely free without leaving a residue, it makes washing items by hand extremely easy.

When I travel, I fill up a tablespoon of Charlie’s Soap into one of those tiny ziplock baggies (the ones you can buy at hobby stores, that are only about the size of a credit card). I mark the outside of the baggies with a permanent marker to note what it is, and I find that I can easily tote a few of these in my dry toiletries bag with ease (Psst: once you’ve used up your sack of Charlie’s Soap, you can then use the sack as your dry toiletries bag! Woo hoo!). It’s considerably easier than decanting a load’s worth of liquid laundry detergent into a travel-sized bottle (or buying pre-filled bottles of laundry detergent), and it’s way cheaper than buying a small single-load box of laundry soap at the laundromat.

Fill a little reseable plastic baggie with a tablespoon of Charlie’s Soap. Mark the baggie with a marker so you can easily tell what it is, and you’re good to go. Image by Lani Teshima.

Best of all, I find that it does a great job of washing lighter and smaller items in the hotel bathroom sink with ease. I fill up the basin with water and Charlie’s Soap, and I’m actually quite impressed at how much dirt winds up in the basin water. And since it doesn’t overbubble, I find that a quick couple of rinses in plain water will get out all the soap residue really quickly. When you’re done, you’ve got squeaky clean clothes to hang, that leave no perfume or artficial fragrance.

The fact that you’d be supporting a small mom-and-pop factory out of North Carolina is just icing on the cake!

You can purchase your own sack of Charlie’s Soap at Charliesoap.com. One sack (which lasts 80 loads) costs $15.49 and ships within the U.S. for $5.00. However if you’re sold on the stuff and you buy more than 2 sacks in your order, they waive the shipping fee and give you a few bucks off to boot.

One thing about women: our clothes don’t always come with pockets. Or if they do, they’re small and more for aesthetic purposes. Unless you wear cargo pants with huge pockets, chances are, you carry a purse in order to keep your wallet, phone, and other items near you. But what if you don’t want to carry around a purse all the time? The product I’ll review today is the Baggallini Teenee wallet purse.

The Baggallini Teenee wallet purse.

The Teenee is a simple flap-based wallet with multiple pockets and a detachable adjustable strap that lets you carry it as an across-the-shoulder purse or as a belt bag. As wallets go, the Teenee isn’t tiny. Unless you have really big pockets, you probably won’t be able to tuck this into a pocket easily.

This wallet is deceptively simple. Before you even open the wallet, you can see that it has a zippered pocket in the front flap. It’s not huge, but it’s big enough to hold credit cards, change, bills, and so on. So let’s take a look inside.

The Teenee when you open its main flap to reveal the inner pockets.

The flap snaps shut with a little magnetic button. There’s convenience to that, since you don’t have to fuss to get the snap parts to match exactly in order for this to shut. The down side however, is when you have your Teenee stuffed to the gills so the magnets don’t quite touch.

I told you the inside was deceptively simple, yes? Let’s take a look at the actual pockets.

The transparent ID card holder.

First, there is the transparent ID card holder on the flap itself. The holder fits a standard driver’s license or credit card. You can choose to have your ID card faced up or down depending on how you’d like to show your ID to whomever you’re showing it to. I personally prefer to keep my ID in there so that the top of the ID is near the magnet. Since I wear my Teenee with the flap side out, when I open the flap to get to my money, all I have to do is present the flap to the cashier without flipping the flap or turning it around.

You can actually fit a few cards in the transparent window, so if you have things you like to get to easily, like an ATM card, the window may be a convenient place for you.

Note the little pen holder. Most retractable pens should fit in it just fine, with a couple of caveats:

• The elastic loop is quite loose, so if you have a very narrow pen, it may slip out.
• The elastic loop is centered on the wallet, so if the pen’s clip is short, you will need to slide it in considerably in order to clip it to the loop.

In my case, I use a Pilot G2 mini pen, as its clip seems to be at the right place to be able to clip onto the loop. I’ve never lost a pen this way yet.

Now let’s take a look at the pockets.

The internal pockets in a Teenee.

Hopefully you can see all the layers of pockets in the photo above. The very front pocket, where my pink cell phone is, is gusseted. It means you can fit items that are thicker. Cell phones certainly work, as do MP3 players. I’ve tested an iPhone in the gusseted pocket, and it fits just fine. If you have a thin digital camera, you may even get those to fit as well.

The pocket layer right behind the cell phone, if you look carefully, is the layer where I keep my money. I fold the bills in half and they fit just fine. I normally keep my change in there as well but be aware that because that particular pocket has no zipper, you might risk occasionally losing some change. I’ve gotten into the habit of taking out my change every few days to keep the wallet light, and it’s also one way to prevent loose change. There is a zippered pocket (we’ll get there in a moment) you can use to stash your change as well.

It’s really hard to see, but behind the pocket with the bills is another unzippered pocket layer. In my case, this is where I keep a tiny notebook (if you care, it’s a Moleskine Volant Mini extra-small softcover notebook). These are perfect for jotting down notes. It’s too small that you can’t see it in the photo, but you could also use a small Post-It notepad or something similar as well.

The back zippered pocket is large enough to easily fit a passport.

Finally, there is the zippered pocket at the very back. There is a ton of room back there, and for travelers, the most relevant is the fact that you can fit a standard-sized passport in that pocket. Because you can zip it up, it provides a little extra security as you hide it away. By the way, the zipper hides pockets on both the main body and the flap. I rarely use the flap side, since I’d hate to unzip the pocket and have whatever I’ve got stashed in the flap side fall out, but it’s additional space if you need to keep important things somewhere.

If you think we’re done, you’re wrong! We haven’t looked at the back of this thing.

The back of the Teenee has its own zippered pocket.

As you can see in this photo, the back of the wallet has an additional zippered pocket. This is very convenient if you need to keep something in your wallet that you want to get to relatively easily. Maybe you can keep your change there?

Now, let’s look at the rest of the back of this thing. There’s so much going on, I’ve actually labeled the parts for you:

The back of the Teenee wallet, with parts labeled.

In addition to the zipper you see running across the back for the pocket I just mentioned, there is a super-secret unnoticeable card slot right in front of the zipper. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d assume it was just the hem for the zipper! The clever thing is that this little card slot is sized to fit a credit card. Once I realized the convenience of this little card slot pocket, I’ve used it to stash BART (train) tickets and bus tranfers. Visiting a casino? I stash my loyalty card and hotel key in there. Visiting a Disney theme park? I put my Fastpass tickets in there. The Teenee would’ve been a full-featured wallet with everything else; there was no need for Baggallini to add this little card slot, but they did, and it’s quite handy (not to mention clever)!

Finally, let’s look at how you carry this thing. Each Teenee comes with a very thin adjustable strap made of the same color and fabric as your wallet. For most people, if you wore it across the chest with the strap fully extended, it will reach your thighs. The strap is that long. If you shortened it as tight as it would go, you would wind up with a tiny over-the-shoulder purse that lands around your elbow level.

If you want to carry this as a sling of any sort, you will want to put the strap on the D-rings on the top. If you want to shorten the strap and wear loosely around your waist, you will want to snap the straps onto the lower set of D-rings. Actually, you could really snap the strap on either set; it would be a matter of personal preference whether you want the wallet riding higher or lower on your waist.

If you are slender, you will find that the strap (even adjusted as short as it’ll go) is still too long for you to wear the Teenee straight across your waist. You will likely wind up wearing it on a slant. And if you’re very slender, you will need to make sure the strap doesn’t fall down past your hips. If this is the case, there are a couple of tricks you can use; the easiest being that you can just tie a knot into your strap to take up the extra length.

See that pair of vertical strapping you see going down the back of the wallet? Those are actually belt loops. So you can go without the strap altogether, and just loop your belt through it and wear it as a true belt bag. Obviously you won’t be able to access the back pockets easily, but wearing it this way (especially if you wear your shirt and jacket over it) would provide some added security.

Finally, since the strap is completely detachable, you could carry this wallet as a real wallet if you have a larger purse to put it in. It’s still smaller than some wallets I’ve seen, full of bulk and taking up a ton of space in the purse. If you want to switch between using it as a wallet-in-your-purse and carrying it as its own little wallet purse, I suggest you always keep the strap and wallet together. In my opinion, the best place for it is that back zippered pocket. It will add a little bulk to your wallet, but that way you will never lose the strap.

This wallet comes in a myriad of colors.

Promotional photo from Baggallini showing all the different colors available for the Teenee.

You could really have your pick of what color you want. There are some pretty neutral travel-friendly colors like black, brown, and khaki. There are some very springlike pastels, robust fall colors, as well as some fashionable colors like that bright red you see in the front. Regardless of the color you pick, all the zipper pulls, D-rings and other components use a brushed silver-toned metal, making these wallets nice enough for going out with. OK so it may not work for the most formal of parties or dinners (although you could probably easily replace the strap with your own wrist chain strap to get it “all dooded up” for a fancy event).

This particular wallet has been in the Baggallini line-up for quite some time. Periodically, they will introduce new fabrics and new colors. The ones they’ve offered in the past (and which you may still find some remaining stock online or in some travel stores) are microfiber, ripstop nylon, and an eco-labeled one that used a couple of plastic bottles each to make. The current fabric with the largest color offering is “crinkle nylon” (that’s the one you see in these photos).

Deborah wears a Teenee across the shoulder (the design is a harder-to-find giraffe print).

With all of these great pockets and features, though, I do have two very specific druthers:

#1: I am not pleased with the placement of the top set of D-rings on the back. I know why they did it. They wanted the short (quarter-inch long) strap that connects the top D-rings to be aligned with the belt loops below for aesthetic purposes. But I’ve actually taken the top D-ring straps apart (all in the name of research!), and there is no actual connection between those D-ring straps and the belt loops. The problem I have is that the top D-rings are very close together. When you wear the wallet across your chest, the straps look “cross-eyed” (for want of a better term) because they are knock-kneed and too close together. I would really prefer that they splinter off from trying to align the D-rings with the belt loops, and simply sew them at the very top of the wallet right into the exterior piping along the edges.

#2: As much as it can hold, it’s still a wallet and not a purse. I really wish they had a slightly larger size that would fit slightly larger digital cameras or a small Moleskine notebook. I’m thinking just an extra half-inch in width would do a lot to open things up, and still have it be small enough to be considered a wallet. [Hey folks at Baggallini, how's about a slightly larger version to augment your existing model?]

All in all, this is a wonderful little wallet for women. It’s great for everyday use, you can wear it as its own wallet-purse or stick it in a larger purse. Wear it at work so you don’t have to worry about leaving your wallet in your purse as it sits unsecured under your desk. Or tuck your passport in there and head out the door for some hands-free travel.

Guys could even use this as a belt bag. After all, guys often wind up with a wallet in the back pocket, spare change in the front, and cell phone in another pocket or clipped to the belt. You could use a neutral-colored Teenee to keep all of that in one place!

Best of all, you can buy the Teenee at most places for under $20. Whether that’s a special treat splurge or cheap enough for you to buy several different colors to match your outfit, I give the Teenee a huge “way to go” for designing so much creativity and practicality into such a “Teenee” tiny package!

Baggallini Teenee online at a glance:

• Official Web page at Baggallini
• Various models at eBags (they are often on sale for well under $20)
• Various models at Amazon

If you’ve served in the military or know anyone who does, you’re probably familiar with military dog tags. They are 2-inch-long thin pieces of oval metal that have important information embossed onto them, which you wear on a bead chain around your neck.

There are companies that will make these dog tags for civilians, and these days you can even order them online. One company, however, has come up with a clever way to market them: As luggage tags.

TravelDogTags.com is a very simple site, and they don’t sell a lot of different products. In fact, they really only sell the dog tags, plus the accoutrements that you use the dog tags with.

In my view, the real clever part of what they sell is their “luggage wires.” They are 6-inch-long plastic-coated stainless steel-stranded wire. The ends come together with a little metal twist connector, making these very difficult to accidentally remove.

A Travel Dog Tag in the center is surrounded by a long and short bead chain, luggage wire, and three plastic silencers.

In addition to the luggage wires, you can order your luggage tag sets to include plastic silencers in your choice of color, as well as bead chains. The silencers are rubbery, and you pull them around the edge of the dog tags so that they don’t clang together. The bead chains they sell are like the type you get with a military dog tag (that is, you string the shorter chain through the dog tag, then you string the long chain through the loop you just made with the shorter chain).

You can easily hang your dog tag anywhere on your bag, including on zippers.

There’s a couple of reasons I really like this idea:

Durable – These things are extremely durable. Made of stainless steel, they don’t rust, stain, or corrode, and the letters don’t fade in the sun and you don’t have to worry about the ink running if it gets wet.

Subtle – If you want to avoid the big and bright luggage tags, or the smaller leather ones that scream “I’m traveling!” then this is unusual enough that I think it’s a really good option. Most people wouldn’t look at these and immediately assume they are your luggage tag.

Double-duty – My favorite reason to use this is that it also serves as a regular dog tag when you aren’t traveling. Consider wearing it with the bead chain around your neck (or secured on a shoe string) when you go out for a jog or go out on a hike. If you are in an accident and you can’t easily communicate, they will quickly be able to find out who you are.

The same dog tag that served as a luggage tag a moment ago, is now a regular dog tag on a neck chain.

By the way, the size is small enough that it would work pretty nicely as a real dog tag for dogs, too.

There are a couple of caveats:

Due to the size of the block letters and the size of the dog tags, you are restricted to about 15 characters per line. You can get up to 5 lines, but if you have a long name or long address, you need to figure out how you can shorten things and still have the information be understandable. Although it can handle the “@” sign, most email addresses will be too long to get on a single line.

Also, because the letters are embossed right onto the metal tag, the information is permanent. If you move or change phone numbers, you will need to order a new one.

That said, a luggage tag set is only $5.95. A bargain in this day and age. You can buy kits for everyone in your family and have change to spare.

Product Web site: TravelDogTags.com

Some fantastic news for fans of Ellington Leather’s original Sussex travel tote. Some years back, mail order retailer Norm Thompson used to carry a smaller version of Ellington’s Sussex travel tote:

The Ellington Stella tote. Image from Ellington Leather.

The beauty in this bag was its simplicity; it was a simple purse with straps that, when pulled outward, would cinch the top and convert the bag into a backpack. It was great as a smart purse that you could quickly convert to a backpack at the airport if you needed your hands free, or you needed to manage your kids on the go.

The only catch with this bag was that they did away with the popular small size, and only had the larger tote bag size for quite a while. The converted backpack was about the size of a bookpack instead of a smaller purse, and too large if you just wanted a regular-sized purse.

A simple diagram showing how to convert a purse to a backpack. Image from Lazar’s Luggage Superstore.

Ellington did sell a leather version in the smaller size, but the material meant it weighed more, and it was considerably more expensive (usually retailing for over $150.00).

For 2009, however, Ellington has introduced its new “Lightweight Travel” line, which includes a revamped version of this popular bag!

Ellington’s new Lightweight Travel Tote/Pack. Image from LuggageOnline.com.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the Lightweight Travel Tote/Pack has a straighter silhouette and is more angular. The center drops down a little more, to create a more flattering shape when you wear this as a backpack. They’ve also changed the fabric from nylon to microfiber, which while a bit stiffer and not as squishable as the nylon, is very travel-friendly and will stand up to a lot of wear. The smarter silhouette means you can probably use this for business travel as well.

Finally, they’ve fixed the main problem that plagued the original small Sussex bag: This newer version now has a zipper that runs the full length of the main opening, making this much more secure than its predecessor.

This new Lightweight Travel Tote/Pack is available in four travel-friendly colors (black, grey, red, and periwinkle). You can find it at a few online retailers such as LuggageOnline as well as from Ellington Leather directly, but your best deal right now is at eBags.com, where the retail price of $66 has been reduced to $52.80. Not sure how long that sale will be going on for (they are currently having a Spring sale), but even at $66 it’s not a bad deal.

Hey look, it’s Lani crawling out of her cave! [Is it spring yet?]

Just a heads-up that Campmor is having a slew of Jansport bags on sale, including a few items that I think Travelite readers may want to consider:

	Jansport Euro Sak Travel Conversion Pack Regular Price: $145.00 Campmor Price: $49.97 Savings: $95.03 This traditional convertible backpack bag is a maximum-sized carry-on with stowaway backpack straps and a removable shoulder strap.
	JanSport Half Pint Daypack Campmor price: $12.99 This is one of those small “backpacks” that are more like small purses. Nothing fancy here, except that they offer this model in an amazingly large assortment of colors and patterns. Plus, at $12.99 how can you go wrong?
	JanSport Fifth Ave. II Campmor price: $9.99 Available in black, navy, and lavender (shown here), this item is a no-frills belt bag/fanny pack. If you like to use one of these as your little day bag while you toodle around Disneyland or something, $9.99 is an amazing bargain.

They have a full page worth of bags at that URL, including a wheeled bag (just a tad too bit to carry on), computer cases, soft-sided briefcases, external frame backpacks and standard school backpacks. I’ll personally try to pick up one of those Half Pints. As soon as I can decide what pattern I like.

Timbuk2 Stowaway Update

Last month, I told you about the Timbuk2 Stowaway. Since then, I’ve been testing it out, and I can offer some comments for you:

Stiff fabric: Timbuk2 is known for really rugged fabric, and the Stowaway is no exception. It is definitely very rugged, and I’ll never have to worry about the hems coming apart. That said, one issue with such stiff fabric is that when you have this bag set up to fold in the center, the folded part tends not to lay flat… especially if you have more than the minimal amount of stuff in the bag. That is, the “flap” (the top half the bag) sticks out a bit. I found that wearing the flap part against my body helped a bit, but unless I run this through the wash several times I don’t think it will get floppy at all.

D-rings: I’m accustomed to D-shaped rings on my Timbuk2 Metro, so I was a little surprised to find that the metal rings on this bag are very shiny, very thick, and very angular. In fact, I wouldn’t even call them D-rings; I’d call them rectangles. Maybe they were trying to go for an angular look to match the cut of the bag, but personally I don’t think the look of those rectangles is very flattering, and the angles make the straps a little harder to put on and off.

Strap: Speaking of the strap, the buckle ends are also the same shiny metal as the rectangles. Plus, they are also very stiff, meaning it actually takes a bit of force to remove and latch them onto the rectangles. If you’re used to the easier snap-on/snap-off of their quick release straps, you’re in for a surprise.

Conclusion

The good: This bag is best when you latch your strap onto the top ends and unfold the middle, and use it like a bigger bag. You can fit quite a bit in there, and it manages not to stick out too far because of the way it’s cut. It’s a simple bag with no dividers on the inside, so you can pack whatever you want and still manage to look relatively stylish.

The bad: The buckles on the strap are a pain to change. The metal is way too shiny (matte would’ve been so much better… or a smaller version of the curved D-rings from the Metro would’ve been so much better). If you’re the type to put a lot of smaller stuff in your bag (oh, let’s say a couple of pocket Moleskine notebooks, some pens, sunglasses case, cell phone, an iPod, and so on), be prepared to have to spend time trying to figure out where things are by touch. Even if you are wearing the bag folded, you have to reach in from the tall opening and reach deeeep into the chasm of the bag. The yellow version of this bag may make that an easier task, but the fabric is so thick I’m not sure how much more light you’d have to work with.

If given another opportunity to obtain this bag, I think I’d give it a pass, personally.

Speaking of Timbuk2…

I checked out their newest little Metro cousin, the Click.

An updated version of their popular extra-small Metro bag. Image from Timbuk2.

The thing is adorably cute, but if you are a Metro fan like me, you need to be aware of a couple of things:

• The strap is nonremovable! This was a huge disappointment for me, because I am a huge fan of their quick-adjust shoulder strap. And the reason the strap doesn’t come off is because…
• There is no hand-carrying handle on the top of this bag, something you get in the Metro. And the reason you probably don’t get the hand handle is because…
• There is no buckle release on the flap. Instead, you get a little pull-tab and you close the bag with Velcro. And without the 100% security of a buckled in flap, that Velcro will not likely keep the flap shut should you try to carry this with a carrying handle that’s only attached to the flap.

Don’t get me wrong. This is definitely very streamlined. It’s the same size as the Metro, and it’s really quite cute. I actually ordered that same one in the photo and was all excited to use it, until I noticed that the strap was sewn on there tight.

I wound up returning mine. Oh well, ya can’t win ‘em all.

Popular messenger bag manufacturer Timbuk2 has recently begun selling products geared towards travel. You can see their travel-related products at their Web site here.

Nothing particularly revolutionary about their travel products, but they do now have a wheeled bag, as well as carry-ons that have that general Timbuk2 feel. They do have a few notable products, though, including what I think is their most travel-friendly product: the Timbuk2 Stowaway Ballistic Nylon bag.

The Stowaway Ballistic Nylon bag is a very streamlined shoulder bag with an adjustable strap that lets you wear it as an over-the-shoulder bag or as a cross-body bag.

The Timbuk2 Stowaway Ballistic Nylon bag. Image from Timbuk2.

The neat trick with this bag is that you can expand its height based on where you clip your strap. If you clip the strap to the center D-rings, you can fold the “flap” over and the bag looks like a purse or a streamlined messenger bag.

If you clip the strap on the D-rings near the edge of the flap, you unfold the flap and suddenly you go from landscape to portrait, and increase the height and capacity of your bag twofold.

The Timbuk2 Stowaway Ballistic Nylon bag with the strap clipped to the end D-rings turns the landscape-perspective messenger bag into a portrait perspective shoulder bag. Image by Timbuk2.

How simple is that? I love these clever little ideas that provide simple, yet elegant solutions.

The bag looks like it’s designed specifically to be travel-friendly as well. Take a look at the strap. It uses the same fabric as the bag itself, which means it’s pretty lightweight and lies flat. No fancy plastic snaps or clips here; everything is compact and flat.

The main opening has a zip closure, and I really like this feature when the bag is folded over. Thinking back to my Rome trip last year, I’m thinking that this bag will be much harder to pickpocket. If you zip the bag closed, fold the flap over, expand the strap to wear it across your body, and flip the bag so that the flap is on the inside facing you, a pickpocket has almost zero ability to get to the bag’s contents short of slicing off your strap or a slashing a hole on the bottom of your bag. The pickpocket would have to manage to unzip the edge of the flap (which is against your body), then extend his whole hand into the unzipped flap opening, reach up, then bend his wrist down to be able to access anthing. In the meantime, he would need to bring his elbow down so that he can try to gain access without lifting the flap up too much. Definitely an awkward position, and one that would be almost impossible to pull off quickly or without notice.

I also really like the simple solution for how this bag expands. A lot of expanding bags will hide the extra fabric under a zipper, where neither that zipper nor the expandable portion of the fabric is serving any purpose when not in use. The Stowaway, on the other hand, actually incorporates the expandable portion as part of the contracted form, in the use of a flap.

The Stowaway includes a smaller pocket compartment, which you can either hide altogether when you fold the flap over, or have it be easily accessible by folding the flap the other way. Image from Timbuk2.

The bag weighs just under a pound. And when emptied, the easiest way to pack this would be to simply line this along the side of your carry-on bag. You probably won’t even notice it.

The only drawback, if any, is that it is currently only offered in one color scheme: “silver/lemon.” It’s a  gender-neutral color combination, but I would love to see this bag made available in other travel-friendly colors like brown, khaki, tan, or black.

That said, there are technically four ways you can wear this bag, and two of them let you hide the yellow center front panel. In the following diagram from Timbuk2, you can see that the center panel is only on one side of the bag. You can choose to wear the reverse side outward so that the bag looks just gray. Doing so lets you access that smaller pocket directly as well.

This Timbuk2 diagram shows the four ways you can wear this bag. Image by Timbuk2.

I’d give this one a rating of 4.5 out of 5. And that half rating may go up to 5 when there are other, more travel-friendly colors available.

Details:

• Product Web page
• Price: $50, plus tax and shipping (can be ordered directly from manufacturer)
• Dimensions: 11.75″ by 9″ expanded, 2.25″ deep
• Weight: 0.9 pounds