My Broken Suitcase Just Won’t Due for a Trip to Wales Tonight

Tonight I’ll board a 777 and fly to Manchester England, where tomorrow morning I’ll join several other travel bloggers and begin a trip through Wales. I haven’t ever been there before and the focus of the journey is a culinary one. So we will meet chefs, taste many different foods and be part of four separate groups who will each have a specific focus for the journey. There are history bloggers, and adventure sport bloggers. We will meet up in a castle next Thursday and have a banquet and compare notes.

I enjoy the blank slate nature of this journey. I don’t know anything that is a culinary tradition in Wales, but I do know that when I was in Northern England last summer, the food was first rate. I know that in Wales place names are comically difficult to pronounce, and they have a bumper crop of consonants. I know too that we will be traveling the length of this small country, so we’ll see both the north and the south.

I got a call yesterday from a publicist who wanted me to write about a certain company’s suitcases. I told her my suitcase and backpack history… that I had just purchased a new day pack before my series of trips two weeks ago to Croatia and Texas. But I added that during my trip to Norway, I had broken the handle on my large hard-sided case that was purchased at Costco. She immediately pounced. “Then you’ll need a new suitcase that doesn’t break down on the road right?”  I told her yes, I guess so, but added that it wasn’t that big a deal to me that the one handle broke because I still have two that work fine. “But to a woman that would be a big pain in the butt,” she said emphatically. “I’d probably break a nail trying to fix it, and then, well, it would just cause me to be very unhappy on my trip!”

With that she said she was sending me a new suitcase, and I promised to give it a rigorous testing, since the Britsh maker, Briggs and Riley, guarantee their suitcases for life. I like the idea of a big blue suitcase and she’s right, it’s better to have one that won’t break than a sorry looking one with a broken handle.