Meet Emma

This is Emma.  I bought her last week.

No, I did not buy a special suitcase just for my trip; I have been needing a new suitcase for a while due to the fact that my two existing suitcases, dating from 1992 and 1995 respectively, have completely fallen apart.  Also, they are awkward sizes.  The older and less falling-apart of the two is too gigantic to be useful; its massive size combined with its outdated configuration (it rolls horizontally on four small wheels, dragged by a leash, in contrast to modern suitcases, which stand upright and tilt to roll on two less-small wheels, dragged by a rigid handle) made it difficult to maneuver in airports and almost impossible to deal with in the subway.  It has no internal structure, making packing difficult, and it is so big that it can hold two people's possessions for a week-long trip - even when one of those people is me* - with room to spare.  My smaller and newer-but-still-ancient suitcase was bought as a carry-on bag, although I'm pretty sure that with recent standard-tightening it no longer qualifies (it definitely doesn't fit wheels-out in an overhead compartment).  It's too large to be unobtrusive, too large (and heavy - the thing must weigh 15 pounds empty) to lift comfortably over my head when fully packed, but too small to fit everything I need for more than a couple nights.

So for the past couple years, I've been taking my smaller bag on almost every trip, usually (for any trip longer than about two nights) checking it and taking both a backpack and laptop case as carryon.  The larger bag, meanwhile, was used predominantly as a particularly ugly storage bin.  So as the smaller bag become increasingly useless (most recently, the collapsible handle has stopped collapsing), I decided to replace my two old, wrong-sized, broken bags with two new, slightly smaller bags - a carry-on small enough to actually carry on, and a larger but still-manageable suitcase.

Emma is the latter.  At 28 inches tall and 14 inches square, she is decidedly not a carryon, but with her light construction and compact footprint she's not too unwieldy to haul around the airports and train stations of Europe (as for carrying her up to my 6eme-floor apartment in Paris - that would be the 7th floor in American numbering - that is another issue, which I will deal with at another time, probably very slowly and with much cursing), but she can lie on her side for easy access.  I was originally going to name her Lydia because of her festive colouring, but that seemed like a bad omen for my trip - I certainly don't want my suitcase running off with any British soldiers, no matter how handsome - and Emma seems an appropriate and optimistic namesake: cheerful, overinvolved, and overwhelmingly ept.


* I am not a bad packer!  I am a very good packer.  I always have everything I need on a given trip, and also anything my travel companions need but forgot to pack, and also many things that I might under some conceivable circumstances need, and usually several more books than is possible to read (I have been known to pack one book per day of the trip, with perhaps a couple of extras thrown in just in case).  Obviously I am going to have to pack with unusual lightness and bravado for this trip, since it is simply not possible to fit everything I might need for a month into Emma, or even - if I had such a set of luggage - all five Bennet sisters.