Traveling light, toting carry-on can liberate fliers

At home, Mary Beth Johnson is a high-maintenance clotheshorse whose designer wardrobe spreads to four closets of her suburban Pittsburgh house.

But when she's on the road overseas, Johnson is high-maintenance lite, the queen of carry-on luggage, the woman who thinks nothing of wearing her favorite French black top one day, sleeping in it that night, then wearing it the following two days.

The 103-pound savvy traveler also saves space by jangling onto the airplane wearing several pounds of her chunky jewelry.

Her husband, Dave, a lawyer whose legal briefs take up significant suitcase space, has been known to stuff underwear in the inside pockets of his Travelsmith blazer.

"We are like the Beverly Hillbillies," Mary Beth says about dragging so much stuff onto a plane. "We are both fanatics. We will go to any level not to check a bag."

There are two kind of travelers _ those who travel light and those who say they really ought to, but end up schlepping overstuffed bags on their trek through Europe.

Though you may not yet be prepared to go to the Johnsons' extreme to avoid checking a suitcase, you might have to shed some of your worldly belongings to board a plane without paying a fee. Airlines, hungry for revenue, are cracking down on overweight and oversized luggage.

"It is nothing more than a simple way to make money," says David Rowell, author of The Traveler Insider newsletter, of the luggage fees. "Airlines continue to strip every last penny out of passengers," whether by cutting down on the number of pretzels served or imposing baggage fees.

Doug Dyment, a carry-on evangelist who founded the Web site onebag.com, confirms that passengers with one carry-on can avoid many hassles and delays at the airport.

A carry-on, he says, also saves money in porter tips and gives passengers greater mobility, both to deal with sudden changes in the flight schedules and to be a hotel negotiator.

"If you are walking around Europe and the hotel quotes you too high of a price, you can walk out and get a new room," Dyment says. "You don't have to think, 'I just lugged this stuff here.' " And you don't have to worry about losing your possessions through lost luggage or employee theft. Losing items is a growing concern because screeners can break the locks of bags to search them.

More than anything else, traveling light is a mindset, liberating yourself from the possessions that weigh you down at home, says Richard Bickel, a former travel agent who is now a photographer in Florida.

He often shoots photos in developing nations, and he quips that he only takes enough clothes to fill a "Popeye-to-go box" _ just two outfits he takes turns hand-washing and drying over lamp shades. At the end of the trip, he often gives away some of his clothes to a maid or a street beggar and brings home film and not much else.

"The point of traveling is to get away from home and to create another life for yourself in two to three weeks," he says. "It's therapy as well to get away from the stuff at home that has to be dusted."

Bickel says the best advice he ever read was to fill up your bag, carry it up and down stairs and around the house, and then reconsider your packing.

It's often harder for women to pare down to the essentials, says Kathleen Ameche, author of "The Woman Road Warrior."

"As much as we try to pack light, we often fail because of the shoe issue and the different-outfit issue," says Ameche, who has finally trained herself to stop taking too many shoes by sticking to either a black or blue color scheme.

Hair spray and mousse also take up space, and Mary Beth Johnson has a zany method for leaving hers at home. The Mount Lebanon, Pa., woman gets her hair done when she arrives somewhere, has it plastered with hair spray and then sleeps sitting up for two nights. "I don't have to worry about hair maintenance," she says, who only travels with a carry-on bag because she has lost bags several times.

Lisa Tomasovich, 42, of Ross, Pa., takes all her hair-care and facial products, but in small quantities in her carry-on bag, which is so meticulously organized it fits together like a jigsaw puzzle.

"I travel on such a tight schedule, I don't have time to check a bag," says Tomasovich, a sales director for Hypercom, an Arizona-based company that manufactures credit-card equipment. "I have an hour to go to a customer's appointment. I can't wait for a bag. That could take an hour itself."

But there are drawbacks to the carry-on strategy. Under Transportation Security Administration rules, scissors, pocketknives and other sharp objects cannot be placed in carry-on baggage. Finally, you'll have to carry that bag down long, narrow airplane corridors and then hoist it into the overhead compartment.

Whether you check your bag or carry it on, there are various space-saving packing methods. Lani Teshima, author of www.travelite.org, a travel-tip Web site, says you can "bundle" by taking an item such as a T-shirt and wrap the rest of your clothing around the initial item, as though you were gift-wrapping a present multiple times. That prevents wrinkling. Or you can "roll" by rolling "every item like a cinnamon bun" and stowing it in your bag.

Another obvious way to lighten your load is to buy one of the new light bags out there, says Matthew Frank, manager of Specialty Luggage in Pittsburgh.

Translation: Don't expect the brawny guy in the seat behind you to help you hoist your bag into the overhead. Find a lightweight bag, says Frank, who recommends wheeled bags such as the Swiss Army Werks Traveler, complete with a garment bag and wrinkle minimizer, and the Tumi's T-Tech Vestry for casual travel.

"Any bag I can pick up with my pinkie, it's a good thing," he says about the 8-3/4-pound Tumi T-Tech 22-inch Vestry.

But Dyment and other travel experts are non-wheeled-bag proponents, although they concede it is getting harder to find a bag without wheels.

"People are not thinking the whole thing through. There are huge compromises with wheels," he says. Wheeled bags weigh more than non-wheeled ones and are more rigid, he says. "You lose a lot of space. It is quite dramatic _ like a third. That is just crazy."

But others don't think the flying public will ever go back to toting bags without wheels. "Save your back," Frank says.

Space-conscious travelers may also get more into their bag if they buy mesh cubes and compressors that push the air out. These organizers make it easier to get through security because all the contents are visible.

Of course, young kids can weigh down the load of any traveler. "If you have a toddler, forget traveling light," Dyment says. "You have to bring toys and diapers and clothes and God knows what else. Travel by car. I admit defeat."