(CNN) — It’s been a year of airport chaos and problems with baggage handling have left many travelers struggling to reunite with their luggage.
Flying with only carry-on is as desirable as ever. But for one traveler, even that isn’t minimalist enough. She’s hitting the road with only a small, 12-liter (3-gallon) shoulder bag.
And that’s something that she’s road-tested almost to the extreme.
Schoenman’s path to burden-easing enlightenment began when she studied in Italy before embarking on a post-graduate round-the-world trip. Along the way, she explored Guatemala and later worked teaching English in Ukraine before moving down under 13 years ago.
“I think I had a 55-liter backpack and a day pack that I wore on the front,” she tells CNN Travel of her first trip. A 55-liter pack can be the maximum size — or a little too large — for a carry-on. “And that was me really trying to pack light. That was me thinking, ‘I don’t know how people do it with a 30-liter bag.’
“I didn’t use all those extra things that I packed.”
As she gained more experience as a traveler, she says packing light became more important to her.
“It was literally the carrying of things that started to wear me down. Every time [I’d] have to walk across this airport or find my way to the bus, to the train, to the airport or to the whatever, I would just be like, ‘This sucks.'”
This realization was one of the reasons behind starting Her Packing List in 2010. The aim of the website is to help all travelers, but especially women, pack and plan better for their trips through packing guides and insider tips. The website gets its name from the checklists Schoenman says are an important tool in prepping for travel.
‘That’s all you have?’
Brooke Schoenman has refined her packing techniques since launching a blog on the subject.
Brooke Schoenman
“Preparing for [a trip] was the only thing that you could do to bide your time before you got to leave,” she says. ” So thinking about it and thinking about all the things you could bring and pack, it was exciting.”
The website wasn’t always about minimalist packing, initially offering advice for travelers checking luggage, but it has evolved over the years as Schoenman herself made do with less.
“When [I] first started the site, I didn’t talk all the time…
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