Memaquay's hygiene thread prompted McCrae's toiletries thread. I'm crediting McCrae for prompting this zip-lock thread. My toiletries go into a zip lock.
I use a lot of zip locks. Besides toiletries, there's spare batteries, books, maps, phone/camera juice pack and cables, coils of string, tube of sunblock, toilet paper and so on. Then there's the kitchen box and food barrel. S&P shakers get their own bag, as do the grubby sponge and dishwash, the bag of matches and the tea bags.
Last trip, I overdid it with the food barrel. It was my first time with a food barrel and I couldn't figure out how to load it so that I could find food items. So I built a zip lock bag for every day of the trip. Other than the first and twelfth (last) day, each bag had a breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so it mostly didn't matter which bag I pulled out of the barrel. This daily approach meant bringing 11 bags of breakfast rather than 1 container with 11 servings. Same thing with lunch, which was mostly protein powder. So, 12 gallon bags, and besides dinner, each of those held a breakfast bag and a lunch bag--34 zip locks in all. There were also 6 zip locks of trail mix. And I had a TJ's pounder plus chocolate bar in it's own zip lock. Organizationally, the bag-a-day method worked well, but it was wasteful and by the end of the trip I had quite a collection of empty zip locks. Also, the bags resulted in a lot of wasted space in the food barrel, which didn't matter on this trip.
So, in all, I think I had 50 or 60 zip locks along on that trip. That seems excessive to me. I should obviously rework my food packing, where I could save about 35 bags. I'll still use zip locks for my toiletries and for protecting items and keeping like things together. I also use the bags to keep cords and cables from intermingling. But I think I should be able to pull off a trip with 20 or less bags. Still a lot. Way more than any voyageur ever packed.
Am I alone in my use/abuse of ziplocks?
I use a lot of zip locks. Besides toiletries, there's spare batteries, books, maps, phone/camera juice pack and cables, coils of string, tube of sunblock, toilet paper and so on. Then there's the kitchen box and food barrel. S&P shakers get their own bag, as do the grubby sponge and dishwash, the bag of matches and the tea bags.
Last trip, I overdid it with the food barrel. It was my first time with a food barrel and I couldn't figure out how to load it so that I could find food items. So I built a zip lock bag for every day of the trip. Other than the first and twelfth (last) day, each bag had a breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so it mostly didn't matter which bag I pulled out of the barrel. This daily approach meant bringing 11 bags of breakfast rather than 1 container with 11 servings. Same thing with lunch, which was mostly protein powder. So, 12 gallon bags, and besides dinner, each of those held a breakfast bag and a lunch bag--34 zip locks in all. There were also 6 zip locks of trail mix. And I had a TJ's pounder plus chocolate bar in it's own zip lock. Organizationally, the bag-a-day method worked well, but it was wasteful and by the end of the trip I had quite a collection of empty zip locks. Also, the bags resulted in a lot of wasted space in the food barrel, which didn't matter on this trip.
So, in all, I think I had 50 or 60 zip locks along on that trip. That seems excessive to me. I should obviously rework my food packing, where I could save about 35 bags. I'll still use zip locks for my toiletries and for protecting items and keeping like things together. I also use the bags to keep cords and cables from intermingling. But I think I should be able to pull off a trip with 20 or less bags. Still a lot. Way more than any voyageur ever packed.
Am I alone in my use/abuse of ziplocks?