The Secret to A Really Great Trip!

We do the blog because we very much enjoy sharing our experiences with you when something we think is interesting happens. For the past 16 days, things have been interesting. But we also write to blog to give you something back - something that you can take into the real world to improve your life. What are we talking about? Diet tips? Nope. A real, fast way to make money straight from Wall Street? Nope. This post is how to improve your (travelling) life with just the right bag. One Bag To Rule Them All. This post is a tribute to the unsung hero of this trip: our camera bag.

My new wife is organized-holy crap she is organized. If she sees me hesitating for a moment in the kitchen looking for something, she asks me what I am looking for and ALWAYS knows where it is. Wow. She also transferred this knack of being organized when she travels. Me? I just throw everything in the first available pocket and hope I can find it later. It is a rather frustrating way of doing things especially when I am trying to find something which is all the time.

There are two basic ingredients of a really great trip especially when it spans four different cities over two weeks. The first ingredient is a really great travel agent. Co-op Travel's Alicia did an amazing job of booking the perfect hotels, booking our tours and our flight and rail tickets. Perfect! But Alicia's brilliance only gets us so far. We have to do the rest.

The second secret ingredient to a really great trip was my wife's use of a simple camera bag. Every pocket had a specific purpose. In five minutes, she trained me, "Pockets to Nowhere" Dean how to be super organized and efficient. Yes, Mom, it is true! I am serious, Cam. Let me explain. At the front of the bag, there is a compartment. In there: the wallet. It had a zipper on the front of it with a pocket for the hotel keys. The top compartment: the camera. The right side pocket: extra battery for camcorder and extra camera card. The right pocket: Emergency back up camera and the camera we hand to strangers to take our picture. The back zippered pocket: (the third busiest pocket behind Camera and wallet) Passports and all tickets (Broadway show tickets, Tour tickets, Empire State observatory tickets, etc). We were NEVER looking for anything the entire trip because of my very smart wife's system. In Washington, ol' Pockets to Nowhere showed his face again and put the wallet in his jacket pocket. Within three minutes, alarm bells were going off as to where the wallet was. As was demonstrated from "The Washington Incident" (as it is now known) or "Walletgate", strict adherence to this system also detects important missing things in seconds. It was really amazing.

In New Orleans, Selena and I were on our first tour and she had two failures with the camcorder at once: the battery and the tape. This was a walking tour so we couldn't really stop or we would miss a cool story or something. Like a surgeon, Selena called out for "Battery!" - I was able to hand one to her in seconds because I knew where to look. "Tape!" she ordered next - again I was able to comply easily because of the five minutes of training I had received on "The Bag" Crisis averted - camcorder up and running and we hadn't fallen behind a single step in the walking tour. Nice!

We used this bag system for the whole trip and it made the trip run like a well oiled machine. Awesome.

So there you go, the secret to a really great trip: a camera bag.