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So, um, this strat this episode is going to talk a little bit more about um Strategies for flying well. And there are a few assumptions. Number one, you are taking air travel. Road trips don’t count. Fuck Amtrak. There are a lot of different ways to get around, but we are assuming you are going to hop in a sky tube and you’re going to get someplace. There’s a lot of stuff that’s predicated on that. Another thing is you’re I’m assuming a relatively similar travel schedule, which is that I fly about 10 to 15 times a year. less this year, but I also fly long haul about two to three times a year. So that is assuming a lot of long haul travel. That’s actually less than I want to be taking. And I think definitely less than I’m going to be taking within the next five years. Let’s just start with two to three, which is a modest amount of times to be going to Europe or Asia every year. Also, you may have noticed from our voices, but we’re both dudes, and so our packing strategies are very dudely. I want to be abundantly clear. There are a lot of things that we talk about as far as minimalist travel. That the number one thing I hear from the lady friends in the audience and folks of other genders is that those strategies won’t work for them. So we’re going to dump a bunch of resources on you in the show notes that are written by women and that show how you can actually pull off minimalist travel in a way that doesn’t reference suits. And ties and pocket squares because those are important for dudes, but less important for ladies. That’s all the assumptions I’ve got for your assumption.

Oh, fourth assumption. I like cities. I basically travel to the United Cities of America. So I don’t know what it’s like to go camping or to the country in really any capacity.

It’s about how I fucking hate camping. Well, now you have two thousand word diss on camping. Hi. So before you even get on an airplane, there are a lot of things that you have to do. And one thing that I wrote about in the outline for this, and I’ll do a whole rant about this, and then Kai will probably be able to take over. But you have to figure out what airline to take, what airplane to take, and what airport to fly into. Those sound easy. They aren’t. You will be screwed over by dark pattern user experience design all the bloody time. By end up taking an airline that does not give you the award miles that you actually need. By you may take an airline that gives you the right award miles, but then they give you a regional jet to a large city. You don’t want regional jets. You want seven hundred thirty sevens, more and more regional jets are getting phased in because they’re trying to cut costs. That is bullshit and it sucks and you need to fight against it. Finally, airports. Chicago is a lovely city that has two airports. One of them is the incorrect airport. If somebody tells me I’m flying into Chicago, I give them directions from O’Hare fucking international fucking airport. If you come into Midway, I’m like, you’re on your own. They’re like, what do you mean I’m on my own? I’m like. I will see you in two and a half hours.

And you’re on a plane in first class holding champagne and you don’t even drink.

And it’s 85 degrees.

Catalonia secede. Anyway, uh, so yeah, so another thing, if you end up, um Flying in, say, New York City. A great town. Lovely. Eldritch Horror. Owned by hedge fund managers. It’s great. Go visit. If you’re flying in on United Airlines, fucking don’t do that. Don’t do it. You know why? You’re going to end up in Newark, the worst airport in the United States. If you are putting in an investment, let’s say, so one thing that I recommend for a lot of people, pick a large carrier. that’s boring, where the men drink rye at lunch and put in as many flights as you possibly can on that particular carrier. It’s probably the flag carrier for your country. In the United States, that leaves you with United Delta American, period. There are no other airlines. There are no other options. You have to pick one of those three. And so I live in Chicago. United’s a huge hub in Chicago. So I fly United everywhere, except for when I fly to New York. Then I fly JetBlue because the Terminal 5 and JetBlue at JFK is amazing. It’s the JetBlue and Erlingus terminal. There’s a Muji store, there’s free Wi-Fi, there’s Bernardus 12 in the lounge. I have deliberately done that because I don’t want to fly into Newark ever. I would rather chew glass. And I want to have a decent experience in the airport. That trumps getting the extra 2,000 miles on United that I’d be doing flying back and forth from New York. So, you need to recognize what you’re balancing in all of that and what kind of benefits you’re getting. Also, fucking all of the O’Hare to Newark flights are regional jets. No, no, no, no, no, no. Don’t fly an RJ unless you have to. Don’t fly an economy airline unless you have to. You’re going to get burned on it. Everybody does, and you think that you’re going to be an optimist. Again. The men have to be drinking riot lunch.

Every aspect of the experience is dumpy, right? Like the terminals they fly into are bad. The security is bad. The flight attendants are bad. Every aspect of it is bad.

Right. Yeah. I mean, you just need to fly on boring flag carriers. Pay the extra fifty, hundred bucks to do it. You should be doing that. If you’re a consultant, I assure you that you can afford this sort of thing. It’s totally reasonable. And then, you know, again, pick a carrier and do everything you can to nurture that relationship, but keep looking askance. Right. So. One thing that I do is when I fly elsewhere, I like internationally, I try and fly on The flag carrier airlines that are in the same network. So United is in what’s called Star Alliance, and there are a couple dozen airlines, Scandinavian Airlines, I believe Cafe Pacific is in there, Singapore, that sort of thing. And so when you’re flying elsewhere, ANA is on there, you can get miles on United by flying e. g. , Scandinavian Airlines. So you can take the nicer airline and still end up pretty good. Figuring out what seat to take once you’re on the airplane, there are two things that you should do. Nobody who flies frequently cares about the view out the window. You don’t need a window seat. The only time you should have a window seat is when it is also an aisle seat, when you have the misfortune of being on a regional jet or the grand fortune of being on a long-haul first-class flight. Beyond that, you should be taking an aisle seat. You should be able to get to the flight attendants easily so that you can throw stuff away. You should be able to talk with them more effectively. You should be able to get the amenities that you want. And above all, you should be able to go and crap easily when you’re 30,000 feet in the air. Figuring out what road to do your aisle seat on, go to seatguru. com. And do what you can there. When you check in, try and seek out better seats. Try and seek out better options. Try and seek out cheaper upgrades. Show up early to the airport if you at all possibly can so that you can try and get on the standby list to get business class, especially for long-haul flights. I did this, I showed up at Schipple three hours early. They offered to upgrade me to first class for $41 from Amsterdam to O’Hare. I had an eight-course meal in the sky. I got very lucky. We are very jealous of Nick. I’m sorry.

I mean, it was luck. You won the lottery. I won the lottery. I mean, I’ve had a pretty bad flying year before that, so I deserve to win the flying lottery. Yes. Do all of those things. I think that’s, we just spent 15 minutes talking about taking the plane. I think we need to blaze through. This is going to be pretty. Surface but broad overview.

Let’s talk packing. Never check your luggage if you can avoid it. Which means you need to have one piece of luggage that is the absolute international dimension maximum. for flights. This means you need to be getting a slightly smaller carry on than what is legally allowable in the United States and Canada. You should be carrying that and a backpack, and that’s it. Additional hack, pay to get in groups one or two or get priority boarding. It’s usually about $30 per flight. That allows you to avoid getting gate checked on short flights, especially RJs. is insanely valuable. Get Premier access, show up to your gate about 15 minutes before boarding. The reason that, that is important is so that you can keep an eye on your luggage. save time so you’re not waiting at that luggage carousel. I’ve waited an hour at a luggage carousel before. It’s horrible. You want to be enjoying your trip and you want to not have to deal with any variables in like connecting your flight or whatever have you. So when I flew Ord LHR ARN recently, I flew to Heathrow, had to check through secur uh I had to go through customs, get my luggage, check through security. My not having to check luggage was it saved me about an hour and allowed me to make my connection. Like the only reason I ever check my luggage is when I’m bringing a ton of booze home from somewhere. And you should be doing roughly the same thing.

So, you know, you may be thinking, one international sized carry-on in one backpack equals I can’t go on a plane because I carry a dead body and 25 sacks of grain onto an airplane. Here’s how you pack lightly. There are a lot of things that I do to save space when I’m packing. And so Kai and I have materially a similar essentials list. I actually bring one pair of pants, two shirts, four or five undershirts, one jacket, a raincoat if I’m going someplace rainy. Seven pairs of underwear, three pairs of socks because I use smart wool and you can wear them multiple times. I put them in packing cubes so that they can pack down really easily. I bring a Dop kit. On long haul flights, I also bring on my carry-on sleep mask, earplugs, pajamas, travel adapters, travel pillow. Flat pack backpack, so it packs down, and actually, it’s just like a nylon sack that I bring around instead of my giant backpack. Um, and uh lotion because uh long haul flights are insanely dry and you will absolutely need it. I also bring a folding hanger to accommodate my shirts because there are a lot of times I go to Airbnbs and for some reason they don’t have hangers or whatever have you, where the hangers are crappy. And then I bring no rinse detergent and I hand wash everything in a sink. So I reuse my stuff. No matter how long a flight I do, if I’m traveling for three weeks, I’m still bringing only six or seven pairs of underwear, and I’m hand washing them. Every so often, and just hanging them around my Airbnb. And that allows me to repeat stuff. I minimize shoes because they take up an insane amount of space. I minimize suits and jackets, and I try and wear them on the plane. Planes can get cold, planes can get hot. You need to be able to accommodate wearing either a hoodie on your freezing airplane so that you can fall asleep easily, or taking off a bunch of stuff and wearing a blanket. All of the stuff that the airline provides you is dog shit, even on first class. You end up getting pajamas yeah, you end up getting pajamas that are sandpaper, even on first class. I know this sounds terribly spoiled. They are no substitute for the pajamas that you are familiar with and you wear possibly every day. International travel, I also bring a SIM card that’s called it’s Basically, a sticker that connects on my SIM and it works in any country for a flat rate data plan. It’s called no roaming, K-N-O-W roaming. I use Moochie containers for my toiletries because they’re stackable. I basically beyond that, for things like sleep masks and travel adapters and stuff like that. I go to the wire cutter and I just buy their recommendations and they’ve never steered me astray. I do the same thing for packing cubes. When you’re traveling, Often you are plugging your phone into jacks that you don’t know what they’re actually going to do to your phone. And so I use a little device that’s called a sync stop, and it’s like a dongle that connects between your phone and a jack. And so if you’ve ever plugged your phone into the USB port on like a long haul flight and then asked to share your photos because it’s thinking that you want to play your family videos on the b your seat back. that keeps that from happening. So at the very least, it’s insanely convenient. But also it could potentially be a security risk if you plug in like somebody random’s laptop at a coffee shop or something and you need to be charging your phone in a really fast way. So, you know, do things that can be worn multiple times. I wear Uniqlo shirts, smart wool socks, ex officio underwear. They’re fast dry and make sure that you’re able to flat pack everything as much as humanly possible. There’s very little air left in my luggage. And I’ve never had a problem with it. It’s worked out really, really well for me. Is there anything you want to add on packing stuff?

I can’t tell me how many times I’ve left like little gifts in Airbnbs that were just like the random crap I bought while I was traveling. Oh, yeah, I’ve There’s a bottle of body wash. It’s like economy sized, and I can’t bring it on an airplane. So there you go. Oh, additional packing life hack. Reduce as many liquids as humanly possible so you can go through easier. I don’t have a War on Liquids bag, but I do have bar shampoo. I use JR Ligots. which is amazing. Bar soap. I have shaved soap. The only liquid that I bring through anymore is either my laundry detergent liquid, which you can probably get powder and get away with it. And lotion if it’s a long haul flight and toothpaste. Toothpaste is the big one. And I’ve heard there’s powder toothpaste, which I don’t trust, but like you can go liquid-free when you’re traveling. I bring a giant bottle that’s empty and I just fill it with water right after I get through security. Super, super, super easy.

10 bucks.

As far as luggage is concerned, Kaina differ severely, severely on what’s going on.

Y’all are consultants. You want the upgrade pick. And I have two friends for you. Their names are Briggs and Riley. And yeah, that’s pretty much it. You get a nice Briggs and Riley International sized roller suitcase. And not the Travel Pro garbage where all the zippers are going to break and the Cordoura is going to rip. What model, what collection do you recommend for Brexit Riley?

Oh, God. I forget what it is. I bought it from the wire cutter. Just go on the wire cutter. Um but yeah, so um when you’re actually traveling before you travel Screenshot and print out copies of the following. All of the places you’re staying, your Airbnb listings, your hotel listings. All of your tickets, plane, train, automobile, all of your rental car receipts, all of your airline tickets. Get physical paper copies of them and shred them as you go along the trip. Store copies of your essential documents on Dropbox. I keep an emergency USB in my fifth pocket of my jeans at all times when I’m traveling, and that contains all of my personal documents and all of my Health insurance in an unencrypted folder, and the keys to the Corolla, my one password vault, in an encrypted folder that only Aaron knows the password to. Get a credit card that doesn’t charge international foreign transaction fees. There are many by Capital One and Chase and Citibank that do this. Do not travel internationally with an American Express. Or if you do, just expect that it’s not going to work in half the places you go. Have an overall broad stroke game plan, but don’t be too dogmatic about it, is like my big suggestion.

When you land on a domestic flight, get a drink. When you land on an international flight, get a coffee, then later get a drink. While you’re in the airport, do everything you can to skip all of the lines. I just want to note we went 32 minutes on this podcast episode and did not mention TSA pre-check or global entry in any capacity. Get them The end. I don’t think we need to elaborate on it. You’ll understand. Get global entry. It includes TSA precheck. It costs $100 for every five years. It involves an utterly invasive background check, but you have nothing to hide. Do you? So you’re great. Right? So, once you get through the airport, the goal is to skip as many lines as humanly possible. Priority boarding allows you to not gate check. Getting through TSA allows your life to be considerably easier, so get pre-check. Getting in the lounge is super helpful, which is why it’s important for you to build up a relationship with the carrier. The easiest way to get in the lounge is to buy the credit card that pertains to your carrier that gives you unlimited lounge access. For United is the United Mileage Plus Club card. There’s equivalents for both Delta and American. Delta is American Express Platinum. American Citizen City. I forget exactly what the name of it is. It’s like executive elite cool bedonka donk thing. And then get in the lounge and relax and pour yourself a beer because they have unlimited beer in the lounge. But don’t go too nuts because you have an airplane to get on. And they have free WiFi. There you go. You can just work there. That’s about it for airports. The goal is to be in the airport as little as humanly possible. So when you’re out of the airport, hopefully there’s a train that takes you into town. Take the train. Don’t take the cab. There’s usually a good option. I’ve rarely found situations where the train is not a good viable option. New York is one of them. You want to pretty much have to take a cab. They haven’t built like a high-speed rail line into Grand Central or anything yet.

Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t fully agree with that because it’s theoretically, you should have the stop planned out before you go in. Right. Like, I. If I haven’t done this before I get on the plane, before I get on the plane, I Google what stop I have to get off at, and then I print out a map of. The exact route there in case that my SIM card doesn’t work, something like that. So it’s a little bit, I think we have a different school of thought there. The problem is, for me, when I take cabs around, the more I take a cab, the less I gain fluency with a city when I’m in it, and the more I get divorced from actually being being on the ground and understanding what the contours of it are really like. Which I think transitions nicely into actually being in a city. So how do you wayfind in cities, Kai?

It’s your show too, man.

But anyway, so my number one thing I do when I’m in cities, I walk as much as possible. I bike whenever I can. I take city bike share whenever I can. I take the train whenever possible. I avoid cabs whenever humanly possible. I only do them for when I’m insanely time-crunched or. When the place I’m trying to go is insanely remote and far removed from transit. And that can that’s usually the airport. So it’s never really a huge issue for me. One of my goals in a city is to never take the same route twice because that gives me a greater sense of what the actual city is like. And I end up finding a lot of just amazing serendipitous experiences through that. I don’t know. That’s about it. I keep Metro maps on my iPhone and I just check those so I’m not stuck staring at a uh Metro map all the time.

Yeah. The way I am able to navigate a city. I check Yelp and TripAdvisor and other people for their recommendations. I get rec lists from natives and I go through there. I tend to prioritize natives above TripAdvisor, above Yelp, above Foursquare, but that depends heavily on the city. Foursquare is huge in Tokyo, question mark. So I prioritize Foursquare a little higher there. Um, but yeah. So it it really depends heavily. Um yeah.

And Tokyo too.

Yeah, I hate having to run the errand for SimCard every time I’m in a new country, which happens basically, you know, every other day when you’re in Europe. So What I do is, I get like a global SIM card that just switches over to the correct network when you’re moving into a new country. It works out well for me.

And I’m very excited for that next time you go to Melbourne. Tomorrow. Yeah. Oh, another thing about being on the plane. I schedule roughly every minute. Well, not every minute, but you know. I schedule my flight. I know what movies I’m going to be watching. I have them loaded on my iPad. I know how long it’s going to take me to go through my Instapay per queue. I know how long I’m going to be sleeping. And so I’ve scheduled my time, but it’s also scheduled around the flight attendance time. Like I’m not going to mess with their meal times, and I’m not going to mess with their service. So, you know, I know roughly how long that takes, and you can always Google like the review of the flight. Basically, like all you just say, ORD LHR coach review, and then you know that there’s about a four and a half hour period in the middle of an ord LHR flight that lights out, everybody’s going to be sleeping. And before that, you can, you know, watch dumb movies, listen to music, read Instapaper, do whatever you need to do. But you don’t want to be on a flight running out of something to do. And that goes even more for big flights. So it’s just more ambitious, right? So I flew LAX to Melbourne in February. I actually googled this before this episode. It is the sixteenth longest commercial consumer flight in the world right now. And all the other ones are pretty close by. They like differ by a couple hundred miles. That’s maybe a half hour of flight time. So I, for all intents, was on the longest possible flight I could take. And the last hour of it was a living hell because I ran out of stuff to do. It sucked. And that last hour, I could have been occupying myself with stuff, but I was just there, like staring into the middle distance and listening to the gas album again. And it was like not fun. It was not fun. So, schedule your time. And you can’t do this even on too short of a flight. Like, I fly 30-minute flights sometimes, and it definitely helps because it allows me to just keep my mind occupied and make sure that I’m not. Punting to whatever crappy entertainment system they have.

Due to turbulence, don’t expect to get work done. You might also get a little lightheaded. You might know what to not know what to do, and you’re not going to have enough executive function to get work done. But you can plan out like dumb stuff to listen to, you know? One last thing about the airplane, and I think I’m done for stuff to talk about on the airplane. Air vent. Use it. It is better for your sanitation. You are literally in a sky tube with badly recirculating air with a bunch of people who are probably sick, especially on long haul flights. They’re probably sick with stuff your immune system hasn’t actually adapted to. And that’s just the fact of it. And I don’t want you to get sick after you get on your awesome trip. So do the air vent, do it so it blows directly in front of your face. So the air you’re taking in through your nose is clean. I know, I know it’s small, but it’s important. It also keeps you awake. So, you know, turn it down, not off when you go to sleep.

So, my number one recommendation for jet lag, I strongly recommend getting upgraded to first class on KLM for $41.

In the absence of that, episode end. No, in the absence of that, invest in a sleep mask. Take a melatonin right before you’re going to go to sleep. Rework your meal times because jet lag fucks up your meal times. Drink coffee, not Red Bull, because that sort of uppers actually doesn’t help your ability to sleep when you need to. Always drink coffee. Never not drink coffee. Get Kai Davis addicted to really nice coffee. Oh, God.

Coffee is good.

Yeah, I just agree with all of that. I mean, I try not to use uppers. It’s probably better to use something that’s a little bit more natural than, say, five-hour energy or Red Bull. I think that the actual number of hours of energy is probably a lie anyway. It’s probably more like four and a half.

There’s some truth in advertising issues of five-hour energy.

Well, I need to do a classical privilege confession here by saying I’m a dude, and I do not know what it is like to be a lady. However, Doing a lot of research, looking at a handful of friends’ blog posts. A few years ago, one of my colleagues named Timony West, she wrote a blog post about what she wears every day, and it’s literally what she wears every day, not just in travel. And it’s like four outfits. And she figured out how to pair it back, how to figure out something that she wanted to do, and how to make it work for her, and how to change it up so that it still looked fresh and interesting. There are a lot of other blog posts by women that we’re going to be linking in the show notes that basically talk about how you can change up an outfit and find many combinations. Only goal here is to make you look like you’re not wearing the exact same thing two days in a row for what amounts to probably a three to seven day trip. Because you can repeat after a week. You’re the only one who cares. And I know that sounds terrible, but you can go NormCore and Probably very few people will be critiquing your outfit, especially when you’re traveling.

The bar when you’re traveling. Is a bad T-shirt and a fanny pack and flip-flops, and you signifying as if you’re an American asshole. you can clear that bar very, very easily by wearing, say, a nice button-down shirt. Or vibrant shirts you’ve automatically rocketed into the 99%ile of dressing when you’re traveling. There are only a tiny handful of exceptions where the bar is slightly higher fashion wise, and that is if you are going to fancy places of the following cities Tokyo, Milan, New York City. Even then, no one cares. London, even then no one cares. Paris, even then, no one cares, but you’re probably going to get pickpocketed. That’s about it. That’s about the of all of the places I’ve traveled in my entire stupid life, the only places where I felt like I was underdressing by wearing like a nice button-down shirt were Tokyo and Milan, basically. And I felt like I could have done better in places like New York, or I don’t know why people go to LA, but they’re probably also. But yeah, yeah. I think there’s that informs your minimal packing strategy, right? Like it allows you to pair back to two or three outfits or like, you know, two pairs of pants and two shirts. like a dress or something like that. And then you can accessorize and that’s about it.

I do the Marie Kondo thing where I go through every single one of the objects I’m packing, and then I don’t necessarily ask if it sparks joy and then throw it away. I ask, is this absolutely essential to the trip? And then don’t pack it. And I screwed this up last time. I packed three jackets. Why? I needed one. And it took up an ungodly amount of space. I completely whiffed it. So you’re never not done removing things. Always, always, always have a f. Firm, rational, solid justification for it. That is not the patriarchy. And go with that as your packing strategy. That’s pretty much all I can recommend there.

Why didn’t you hurl it into like one of the rivers in Stockholm and like give it some more protein? Fish need protein. Speeds need protein.

And you thank it for its service. And then you know what you do? You fly back home. And you blast all caps by Mad Villain as you walk through the baggage claim and pass the baggage claim with your carry-on luggage like a boss.