My friends Keitha and Sean (Sean has the blog House of Hot Sauce) were moving to England but needed some help getting there. The airline they were taking allows each passenger 20 kilos of luggage; anything more costs $5 a kilo.
20 kilos of stuff isn’t very much when you’re uprooting and moving to another country, especially one where things are very expensive. Using their bathroom scale, Keitha and Sean found out that their combined luggage weighed about 75 kilos — almost double their total weight allowance.
Being a resourceful couple, they launched an “Adopt a Kilo” program. For a mere five dollars, anyone could sponsor a kilo of their excess luggage. In return, the adoptive “parent” would receive a photograph and status report of their kilo. Being the kind of guy who sometimes plays his accordion beside panhandlers and lets them keep the whole take, I adopted a kilo. Today, I received a photo of that kilo, which turned out to be Sean’s collection of t-shirts:
The t-shirts that I like the most are the Clark Hall Pub ones (the ones marked “clark”) — at Queen’s University, it was my home away from home, where I manned the DJ booth for 5 very lovely (and loud) years. Sean and Keitha were regulars. The Tick ones are pretty cool, too.
If you’re going on an extended journey and need to save every penny, you might want to try something similar to the “Adopt a Kilo” program.