Two weeks carry-on only: what I stopped carrying by day three

On the morning of day three, Wednesday 8 July, I put five things on the shelf of a Warsaw apartment and weighed my pack again. It read 6.97 kg, down from 7.90 kg at the airport two days earlier. I had been carrying 0.93 kg of stuff I had not touched, and I had been carrying it up four flights of stairs.

I test packs and shoes for a living, and I had planned this trip as a carry-on-only test: 14 days in Poland, Monday 6 July to Sunday 19 July 2026, Warsaw, Krakow and Gdansk, with a train between the first two cities and one budget flight between the last two. My Polish is good enough to argue with a laundromat dryer, which came in useful. Here is what went in, what came out and what I would change. The method I use for packs is on how we check.

The pack was Pack B, a 35 L clamshell at 1.1 kg that I know well from my own bench work. The travel backpack guide covers how to choose one. I weighed everything on a hanging scale in my kitchen in Bend the night before. The total, with the pack, was 7.90 kg, not counting what I wore on the plane.

• Pack B, empty: 1.10 kg

• Clothes in the pack: four T-shirts, one long-sleeve base layer, a light fleece, a rain shell, spare trousers, shorts, six pairs of underwear, four pairs of socks, swim shorts and a sun hat, 2.96 kg together

• Sandals B: 0.46 kg

• Wash kit, with sunscreen: 0.62 kg

• First aid and blister kit: 0.15 kg

• Electronics: charger, two cables, adapter, power bank, earbuds and an e-reader, 0.78 kg

• Paper: a paperback, a notebook and pen, documents and a wallet, 0.80 kg

• Everything else: towel, headlamp, empty water bottle, three packing cubes, a packable daypack, a laundry kit and sunglasses, 1.03 kg

On my body I wore Shoe A, one pair of trousers, a T-shirt and a belt, about 1.7 kg. The airline's paid cabin bag on my fare allowed 10 kg and 55 x 40 x 20 cm, so I had 2.1 kg of slack on paper. On paper is where slack tends to stay.

Five items went onto the shelf in Warsaw, and I would not take any of them next time.

Swim shorts, 0.12 kg. None of my three stays had a pool, and the one river beach I passed was cold. A bag of nothing.

The paperback, 0.35 kg, the heaviest single item I left. I read 40 pages on the plane and then my e-reader took over, because it weighs 0.19 kg and does not need a bookmark. If you read paper, pick a thin one and plan to leave it on a shelf anyway.

The packable daypack, 0.20 kg. I packed it in case I wanted a day bag. Pack B is itself a day bag at 35 L, and it was never full after day three. I carried the daypack for two days and used it as a laundry bag once.

The headlamp, 0.09 kg. In July in Poland it is light until nearly 10pm and the stays had lamps. I own a good headlamp and it is for tents, not for this trip.

The travel towel, 0.17 kg. Every one of my three stays supplied towels, so I carried a damp rectangle across a country for nothing. A towel is worth its weight only where you have no towel and expect to swim.

That is 0.93 kg. The pack at 6.97 kg stayed that way until the end of the trip, with a 0.30 kg block of smoked cheese added in Krakow and a pair of damp socks on top.

Four T-shirts and six pairs of underwear sounds like too few, and for 14 days it was exactly right with one machine wash. Socks and underwear went in the sink every second night with a sheet of travel soap and dried overnight on the clothesline. The line's clip broke on day four, and a pair of socks fell into the courtyard of a Krakow guesthouse. I fished them out with a coat hanger.

On Saturday 11 July I used a self-service laundry in Krakow for the T-shirts, the spare trousers and the fleece, and sat for an hour and a half reading about Polish dryer settings I could not make sense of. Everything was dry by Sunday morning. I rewore each T-shirt twice on average between washes, and nobody commented.

The rain shell came out three times, once in a thunderstorm on Tuesday 7 July in Warsaw, which also soaked the spare trousers and gave them their only wear. The fleece was worn five times in Gdansk, in the evenings, when the temperature dropped to about 14°C. In the middle of the day it was too warm to wear and too bulky to forget.

Shoe A is a trail runner. It had about 90 miles on it before the trip, so I knew how its sole wore. I wore it for 12 of the 14 days and Sandals B for the other two, plus most evenings. My phone logged between 14,000 and 21,000 steps a day, most of it on cobbles in Krakow and Gdansk.

What I did not like: the sole is too soft for old cobbles. After a day on the market square in Krakow I could feel individual stones through the forefoot, and my arches complained. On day two, after the Warsaw storm, I put on a damp sock and got a blister on my left heel, which I taped with the kit. The insole curled at the toe on day nine.

What I did like: it dried overnight on a radiator, it was comfortable for long days and it looked fine in restaurants, which for a trail runner is a low bar. Sandals B were good for evenings, for laundry and for the one afternoon above 30°C in Krakow, and I would take them again.

Three things never left my hands. The phone charger went into the wall each night in three different rooms, and the single adapter I carried fitted every socket. The power bank, which I had assumed would be a backup, ended up as the main charger on the train to Krakow, where the seat outlet was taken. The e-reader replaced the paperback, a notebook and a guidebook, and it lasted the whole 14 days on two charges.

The clothes I would count the same way: the four T-shirts, the one pair of trousers I wore every day, and the socks. Everything else in the pack was a spare for a day that did not come. That is the pattern I keep seeing in carry-on trips, in my own and in the lab's. The things you wear daily decide the trip, and the spares decide the weight.

The flight from Krakow to Gdansk was Monday 13 July, a budget carrier, and I had paid for the larger cabin bag. At home I had pushed Pack B through a 55 x 40 x 20 cm frame with 7 kg inside and it went in without force. The budget airline carry-on guide explains how to measure a bag against the sizer, and its advice applies here: pack the front pocket lightly.

At the gate, nobody checked my bag. Three passengers ahead of me, one was pulled aside, made to put a bag through the sizer and asked to pay at the gate. I weighed mine myself on a hanging scale at the airport: 7.4 kg with the cheese and the damp socks. The socks were clipped to the outside of the pack, and the agent told me, in Polish, that one bag means one bag, so the socks went inside.

I do not want to overstate this. One flight and one gate is not a result, and a different gate on a different day might have weighed me. What I can say is that the pack fitted the frame and the weight left room.

Keep: the laundry kit, which was the most useful 0.10 kg I carried. Sandals B. The first aid kit, because of the blister. A single power bank, one adapter and two cables, which was enough for a phone, an e-reader and earbuds.

Change: drop the five items above, take a thin long-sleeve shirt, and trade the soft-soled trail runner for something firmer if the trip is mostly old towns. Pack B itself was fine. Its shoulder straps are thin, and at 7 kg I felt them after about 40 minutes walking from the station in Gdansk, so I shifted the load to the other shoulder at the next corner.

Skip this plan if your trip has evenings below about 10°C, because the fleece and shell will not cover that. It also fails if you need smart clothes for a dinner or a wedding, if you will not be near a laundry every four or five days, or if you carry anything for a child. If you hate sink laundry, forget it, because sink laundry is the whole system.

For a warm trip of one to three weeks, with one budget flight and a laundry in the middle, it works. Start at 8 kg or less, weigh the pack the night before, and see what is still unused on day three. For a packing list built for cold, wet spring days instead, see Japan in spring.