What’s In Your Overnight Bag, Woot?

Often emulated, never emasculated, the indefatigable boys from Woot provide daily deals on electronics and wine, all wrapped up in writing sharp enough to entice you back even without the deals. Woot is a team effort—and they’ve answered in kind.

Hey Woot boys: What’s in your overnight bags?

• Dave: Cheap solid black neck tie—Per cubic inch of storage space, this is likely the most valuable item in my bag. Adding a tie to my jeans and button-down shirt improved my hitchhiking odds, got me past the tourist-blockers at Notre Dame on Easter, and snuck me into the VIP-only Dali museum tour. You’ll want to roll the tie up, to avoid any accordion-style creasing, but otherwise, these low-end ties can handle most of the standard travel crushing, squishing, soaking, and spilling.

• Luke: A durable snack—Hide a snack at the bottom of your bag. Only eat it when you’re starving and don’t have the right change for a snack machine at the airport or hotel. I recommend an individually wrapped crunchy granola bar. It’ll still be good when you find it at the bottom of your bag three years down the road.

• Jason: Layers—No weather report can really convey what it’s going to feel like once you reach your destination. Even in Florida, spring nights can get chilly. And a heavy coat, besides taking up a ridiculous amount of space, is a binary proposition: either you put it on and you’re hot, or you take it off and you’re cold. So if there’s any question about the weather where I’m going, I always pack lots of extra layers: a hoodie, a sweater, a jacket, and long underwear (tops and bottoms). Shorts plus a pair of long underwear bottoms equals pants. A long underwear shirt plus a hoodie plus a jacket equals a coat. A modular wardrobe may not be the most stylish, but it does gives you a finer degree of control over your personal comfort.

• Matthew: Fisher "Bullet" Space Pen & Moleskine Cahier Notebook—Fisher’s Space Pen isn’t the most elegant writer—it won’t oust your favorite fountain pen from its place of honor on the desk in your study. But out on the road, its distinguishing virtues more than compensate for the not-too-stylish ballpoint line it lays down in “visco-elastic, thixotropic ink.” It’s small enough that you could probably even smuggle it into prison without too much discomfort, and it writes right away, at any angle—reportedly even in the rain, through grease, and at 30 degrees below zero. Personally, I’d come in out of the rain—let alone freezing grease—before stopping to write something down, so I haven’t tested this feature. But for trying the crossword puzzle upright on a crowded subway, there’s no better scribbler.

Now, to paraphrase David Lee Roth, you’ve got your pen; let’s get you something to write on. Moleskine’s Kraft-covered, pocket-sized Cahier Notebook is a handy place for everything from flight numbers and times to preliminary notes for those ingenious projects that only come to you on the bus. Mine contains grocery lists and phone numbers of short-term importance. I’ve written addresses of bars where friends instructed me to meet them and the titles of books I’ve seen in stores when I didn’t have the bag space or disposable cash to buy them. I’ve got a rude map to the subway that someone sketched for me in Washington, DC. There’s even—I kid you not—a page where I made a preliminary list of songs and their code numbers while I was trying to narrow the options in a karaoke bar. At 9 by 14 cm, the Cahier’s about the size of your passport, alongside which it can ride in your breast pocket—with the Space Pen, neither of them bulky enough to disrupt the line of your jacket.