So I packed my bags for my San Francisco – Bangkok trip last night.  This is the first of three trips on which I’ll move most of my things to Bangkok in order to set up residence there.

This is where I’m at: three suitcases, two large and one 22″ trolley bag packed with clothes, six bottles of wine, and several hundred CDs in cloth binders and CaseLogic pages.  Bag 1 weighs 60 pounds; Bag 2 weighs 50 pounds; Bag 3 (the trolley) is a more respectable 25 pounds.  Add to this a backpack and a small carry-on bag for a glass vase I want to move.  That’s a lot of bags to handle.

As a 1K on United, I’m allowed three bags weighing up to 70 pound each, so I’m technically on safe ground.  But the bags are still quite heavy considering I will need to handle them in San Francisco by myself.  So my first thought is that I should take a few things out and lighten the load a little.

Here’s the problem: if I take some of the heavy items out, that will just create more heavy items I need to move on later trips.  This is especially true because the quantity of heavy items far outweigh the quantity of lighter items.  In this trip I’ve already moved many of my clothes, but I still have two more boxes (10x13x4) of CDs plus about 8 binders of DVDs.  Not to mention a few kitchen implements I’d like to move.

And I thought I had thinned out my possessions when I moved from San Jose to Kansas City a year ago!  Time for a more ascetic life!