While attending the Midwest Birding Symposium in Lakeside, Ohio, I had the exceptional good fortune to meet Connie, author of Birds O’ The Morning. During our many conversations over the course of the symposium, she casually commented to me that she really appreciated all the interesting items of field gear I profile on Born Again Bird Watcher. This was a great compliment to me, for thanks to my many years of developing and managing products for outdoor enthusiasts I have a particular interest in the field gear available for the activities I enjoy and in which I participate; however I sometimes worry that some readers might not find my reviews and commentary on such items to be of interest or use. Confirmation that some indeed do was most welcome.
That said, I would like to report a few of my observations on an item recently added to my own field kit that I have found to be of exceptional quality and use: the new Filson Passage Medium Dispatch Bag.
As the essentials of this wonderfully useful new field and travel bag have already been detailed in the previously published “Securing My Passage” entry, I will concentrate on the performance of the bag “on the road.”
The trip to the Midwest Birding Symposium in Lakeside, Ohio required travel to Cleveland from Portland, Oregon via (thanks to the modern system of airlines “hubbing” their flights) Houston, Texas. As anyone who travels by air these days well knows, between doing the TSA airport striptease and the lack of space for both one’s person and parcels on-board the airplane, limiting one’s luggage to a minimum is essential. In addition to this, if a laptop is part of one’s carried items, the ability to get this out of it’s case quickly while being herded through security screening and at the same time as one removes jacket, belt, shoes, and anything else mandated on the given day of travel is imperative. But I digress…
Fortunately, thanks to the well-designed internal layout of the Passage Medium Dispatch Bag, the ability to carry all necessary items for either a business or pleasure trip in one piece of luggage, and have easy access to any given item when needed, is assured. In my own bag, I packed my portable office as well as select items of my naturalist kit and and the necessities of psychological survival during multiple cross-country airline flights:
- Dell 15.4 inch screen laptop
- iPod Classic
- Swarovski EL 8x32mm binocular
- Minox Makroskop MS 8x25mm monocular
- Canon G10 camera
- Canon Speedlite 270-EX flash
- Garmin touch screen GPS
- Three hardcover books
- Two Moleskine notebooks
- Four magazines
- iPod / iPhone external battery
- Eyeglasses in a hard shell case
- All cables and chargers for laptop, iPod, iPhone, camera, etc.
Even with all these items packed into the bag, it was neither overloaded nor over-extended. Everything was well secured and the entire bag was well balanced for carrying (thanks to the adjustable wide woven Nylon strap that allows single shoulder as well as cross-body positioning, toting it across airport terminals was perfectly comfortable as well). In addition to holding everything I needed for the trip, the overall exterior size of the bag was not only easily compatible with the overhead storage compartments on every airplane in which I found myself, it was also easily able to be stowed under the seat in front of me – in my case, the aisle seat under which space is even smaller than under the others in each row. This was particularly useful as it put everything I was carrying within easy reach during the flights. Thanks to the remarkable durability of the bag’s construction, including the rugged Nylon material of which it is built and the leather in which it is trimmed and reinforced, all the shoving, storing, and sliding of the bag yielded not a scratch upon it (previous bags of other manufacturers I’ve owned barely survived such handling intact).
Once I arrived at the symposium, I was both working as well as participating in the superb wildlife viewing to be had in the northern Ohio area (particularly at the Black Swamp Bird Observatory). Because of this, I needed both my laptop as well as my bins and camera available to me at all times. Fortunately, the padded laptop pocket in the Medium Dispatch Bag kept my laptop safe while in the field, and the handy outer pockets kept my bins and camera easily accessible for a quick bird watching jaunt when the symposium adjourned for the evening or before it convened in the morning.
In sum, there are precious few bags that can do “yeoman’s service” as both a business and a field bag; the Filson Passage Medium Dispatch Bag is indeed such a bag. Anyone needing either a sturdy kit bag for the field, a great professional-looking bag for traveling , or, like me, both, should most certainly consider it or one of it’s fellow members in the Filson Passage product family for their next luggage purchase.
