Across the various PAX events I’ve been to, I’ve seen multiple people ask for suggestions for what to bring.
While everyone has different packing needs, I’ve been to 10 PAXen to date, and I also travel 2–3 weeks per month for work. Thus, I’ve got a lot of experience with packing in general, and packing for PAX in particular.
I decidedly fall into the “pack light” camp. I like to pack only what I know I’ll need, and I don’t worry about bringing things “just in case” – if I end up needing anything else, I can just buy it when I get there. That’s not a strategy that works for everybody. But even if it doesn’t, I can at least show you what I do pack, and you can use it to get ideas for your own packing list.
Flying out of a smaller city like Dayton, I’m used to having flight layovers on the way to nearly everywhere I travel. While any layover is going to lengthen a trip, one of the most common complaints I hear from traveling companions is when a layover forces them to fly east to go west, or vice versa.
I started thinking about a way to quantify how bad a layover was, and ultimately decided that it would be best to compare the sum of the (great circle) distances for each of the flights flown compared to the (great circle) distance of a direct flight from the origin to the destination:
This would give me a ratio of how much further I flew than I needed to, where a higher ratio would mean a worse layover. A ratio of 2 would mean I flew twice as far as I needed to, a ratio of 3 would mean three times as far, and so on. A ratio of 1 would mean a layover didn’t add any extra distance at all.
In 2018, I visited Australia and New Zealand, each for the first time. Other than that, my travel was largely similar in nature and quantity to 2017 – frequent routine business trips, with a few weekend vacations thrown in.
Hotels
I stayed in hotels a record 124 nights this year.
Business travel was down slightly, but my three-week Australia and New
Zealand vacation added a lot of personal hotel nights.
My longest flight was 8,580 miles (13,808 km) from Dallas to Sydney.
This 17–hour flight was the longest I’ve ever been on. I also flew my
second-longest flight ever this year: 6,516 miles (10,486 km) from Auckland to Los Angeles.
My shortest flight was 139 miles (223 km) from Dallas to Lawton.
[This article is slightly modified from a post I made on the Starmen.Net Forum.]
I travel a lot for work and leisure, and I have rented over 150 cars, so I’ve got some experience on the customer side of car rentals. I’ll try to help you out with what I’ve learned.
With 113 total flights, this was a record flying year for me – the first year I’ve ever exceeded 100 flights. My work flights alone this year exceeded my total flights last year.
Hotels
My hotel nights were pretty consistent with the prior three years; I ended the year with 109 total nights.
New Airports
I only visited five new airports this year, which puts me at a total of 78 airports visited so far.
I play the geocaching game Ingress, and one of its features is the option to do “missions” – specific collections of waypoints to visit. Most of these are relatively short, with under 20 waypoints in a relatively small geographic area.
However, on a road trip that I took earlier this year, I pulled out Ingress on a break and noticed a mission called Ohio County Courthouses, which required visiting the courthouse in each of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties.
