It should come as no surprise that I wasn´t able to leave my Rick Steves Euro Flight Bag alone after its original modification.
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.
The unscathed bag had a gaping opening that cried out for a mesh insert, which I provided. You can´t see it in the photo above, but it´s documented in this blog post. After some more thought, I made a couple more changes to the bag.
The Euro Flight bag has a ring at the very bottom of the bag, to which whatever can be clipped. This mystifies me a little: Why would I want to clip anything all the way at the bottom of my bag?
Not only is that pretty inconvenient, but it´s also always been a rule of mine to avoid keeping anything of real value at the bottom of a travel bag. If anything compromises the bottom of the bag, everything flies out, leading to potential disaster.
Anyway, I generally like to keep the contents of my bags above water, so to speak, both for convenience and potentially as a security measure. So I added several loops to the upper seam of the Euro Flight bag´s lining.
Photo of the inside gray lining of a Rick Steves Euro Flight Bag
showing a black cord loop sewn to an upper seam. Two black Vinyl
O-rings are visible with the cord wrapped around them, above
a set of black mesh pockets. A lime green key leash is snapped
onto the O-rings with a black nylon hook.
The loops themselves are vinyl plumbing O-rings, with poly cord wrapped around them. I´ve never had this kind of loop fail, but, should the plumbing rings break, I´d still have the textile loop to use. The lime tape is a Tom Bihn strap (highly recommended, as are their bags!) with a hook on each end.
While I was at it, I stripped out the hook-and-loop tape on the inner removable pocket. I´ve come to hate hook-and-loop closures on pockets, and this was no exception. I popped a KAM Snap on the flap, and now it´s much more usable. (Though I´m not exactly sure what this pocket is meant for; the pocket itself is attached to the bag lining with hook-and-loop tape, and I´m not sure what you´d keep in in that would cause you to want to remove pocket and contents?)
Image of a removable gray pocket taken from the
inside of a Euro Flight bag. The pocket originally
closed with a hook-and-loop fastening which
has been replaced with a black plastic KAM snap.
Lastly, the Rick Steves name is embroidered on the handle. I´m not a fan of that kind of marketing, even though this was pretty discreet. Usually it´s possible just to carefully remove stitches, but, in this case, some glue had been used a little sloppily — or generously — and it wasn´t possible to do a clean removal.
Photo of the handle of a Euro Flight bag. An embroidered
pink ribbon now covers the place where the Rick Steves
name was once embroidered. Images of several insects and
a stylized sun are embroidered on the ribbon in black.
I wasn´t thrilled about the solution, which was to carefully tack on a bit of decorative trim, but here we are. It is helpful to have something distinctive, but discreet, to mark one´s own bag, and this mod at least does that!
Late edit: There´s one thing that´s very odd about this bag: There´s no way to secure the zippers. Not only that, but the zipper tabs are solid, so it´s not easy to hook them together. Hmmm.
Photo of two zipper tabs on a black bag. The zipper
tabs have corn and vinyl zipper loops attached.
A sliver snap hook connects the two tabs, making
it difficult for someone to open the bag without
fussing with the hook.
I´ve solved this problem before: I added supper pulls to the tabs, and then I secured the opening by putting a clip through the zipper pull loops. It´s not elegant, but it works.
Related post: https://noile.net/2024/09/a-simple-bag-mod/