Bags hold endless fascination for me. Are there ever enough? Is any given one the ´right´ bag? Perhaps tragically, the answers for me are 1) No and 2) There´s always a new choice for a new ´right´purpose.
Image of a Rick Steves Euro Flight bag. The black, squashable, bag
is lying flat. The bag has a U-shaped flap opening with a zipper. On the
flap is a smaller zipper pocket, and below is a full-width pocket, also
closed with a zipper. A soft handle is visible at the top of the bag.
Which is how, after donating dozens of (mostly Bagallini) bags in an attempt to purge the collection, I´ve still ended up with this new Rick Steves bag.
It required adapting, of course.
Rick Steves travel is the the smörgåsbord approach — Steves travelers see a lot of different places in a few days — and my approach is the opposite. When traveling, I want to move in and live in a particular area for as long as possible; I´ll never be a Steves tour consumer.
But his bags are well-thought out and well-made, with features many lack — at very reasonable prices, too. And when I went looking for a style I didn´t want to make, I found exactly what I wanted in Rick Steves´ Euro Flight Bag: a light, deepish, bag with a broad, u-shaped, opening in the front.
Blurry image of an open Euro Flight Bag from
RickSteves.com, showing a black bag with a wide opening with
a green book in an interior pocket, a green shirt at the bottom
of the bag, a map in an exterior pocket, what looks like a glasses
case in an interior side pocket, and a water bottle in an exterior
side pocket. Sadly, I forgot to photo my own bag before modifying
it, so we´re stuck with this blurry image of the unaltered bag.
Reviewers said, though, that the opening was too deep, and things tended to fall out. Most customers seemed to solve this by using a packing cube or a book at the front, but I wanted to use the bag interior without having to plan how I packed it. Rather than using it as a flight bag, I mean to use bag as a toss-and-go-catchall.
Image of the interior of a Euro Flight Bag, showing the gray
lining, and a black mesh screen panel which has been stitched
to the inside of the zipper binding. The mesh has been doubled
at the top to give a little more substance to the top of the panel.
So I grabbed some vinyl bag mesh from stash and cut it to fit around the zipper opening. The selvage edge was tightly woven, so I turned it under to make a tidy and strong upper hem, and then hand hand-sewed the rest of the edges to the beautifully-sewn binding on the inside of the bag. I sewed around the U-opening twice for security.
Image of the outside of an open Euro Flight Bag, showing
a black vinyl mesh screen which has been added to the
U-shaped bag opening. The bag´s gray lining is visible
in the background.
This was an easy, quick, fix to the too-open-opening issue, and one that still lets me see completely into the bag. Now, though, I can toss anything I want into the bag with impunity; I get the benefit of the easily-accessed, wide, U-opening, without any drawbacks.