When I look back on my days on campus and backpacking around the world and compare them with what I see today I can’t but help be completely amazed. Today’s students and young travelers are all wired and connected. Just down the road from my apartment in Berlin is a hostel that is really popular with backpackers and students. Whenever I walk past in the evening I see a completely different sight from the one in my day when we all sat around talking and smoking and drinking. These days everyone seems to be online with their laptop computers in the hostels. It makes a lot of sense. Being online with a laptop sure is a quicker way of staying in touch with people back home than it was by sending snail mail, but it also poses unique concerns when it comes to finding bags for laptops that meet the needs of the modern backpacker.
The first issue to consider is that it is not wise to put a laptop into one’s ordinary baggage on an airplane because of the risk that it will be stolen or damaged when some careless baggage handler throws it onto the conveyor belt or drops it out of the plane’s hold by mistake. This is probably even more true when one is using a backpack as your main form of luggage because these are usually treated even more roughly than normal suitcases and they also lack much of the padding and protection that a hard-shell case would provide. The question then becomes one of carrying it onto the plane. Purely when considering the convenience of carrying a laptop onto planes and around town it is hard to a beat a checkpoint friendly laptop rucksack. There is a wide range of these available that both protect your laptop and will also make it quick and easy getting through airport security checkpoints without having to remove the laptop. If you choose a big enough one then you have a useful day pack for touring and sightseeing too. The only difficulty comes when you are leaving the airport and have a large backpack on your back and a smaller laptop rucksack to also deal with. My solution is to wear the big one on my back and the little one on front. It isn’t too comfortable and it is not elegant, but it works.
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