When you drop off your baggage at the check-in counter, it sets off a modern Rube Goldberg-like system to keep your stuff on track. Bags are sent along conveyors, scanned, sorted and carried by humans to the right plane. Yet a recent article stated that 26 million checked bags go missing every year . The...

Security officers x-ray luggage at Chitose airport in Hokkaido, Japan. Photo: Miki Yoshihito / Flickr Creative Commons In this age of increased security, sometimes airport officials will pounce on innocent items that look dangerous in an x-ray scanner. The list of restricted or banned items just gets longer and longer. Sometimes, it seems like things...

Since I am in the process of moving to Australia, I'm in a frenzy of figuring out what to bring, how to get it there, why i want it, and what the heck I'm doing. Although I'll be studying at a university in Perth for at least a year, shipping furniture cross-continentally is ultimately pointless;...

Whether I'll be away for a week or a month, I always follow this rule: take only one bag with you. This may seem like an extreme rule, but there are just too many benefits to traveling light. The most obvious benefit is the convenience. If you'll be traveling by plane, you just have one...