I strongly recommend the Matador SEG42 Travel Pack because it lets us designate enough storage area for each member of our four-person family for shorter trips and lets me easily organize myself for multi-day travel.

Pre-pandemic, I was on the road pretty often. I would go for two- or three-night night trips at least every other month, and often monthly. I got pretty good at living out of a suitcase (or backpack, depending on trip length and the gear or apparel I needed to bring along), but anyone who travels often will tell you that, invariably, by the end of the trip your suitcase tends to be more of a dumping ground, all that well-reasoned organization and careful folding and precise packing out the window when you just want to get home and do some laundry. Which is why I came to love the Matador SEG42 Travel Pack. I’ll get into the specifics on why it’s a great bag for solo use in a moment.

Though COVID-19 curtailed my travel pretty much completely, as a family we still managed to go for the occasional weekend trip, our destinations tending to be a campground or cabin or, less often, a hotel, and our packing very much planned out to ensure there would be no need to enter any shops or, often enough, even a grocery store. These self-contained family trips, so to speak, led me to realize that, ironically, the bag I prized for solo travel was also a great choice for use with the gang.

The SEG42 Travel Pack is divided into five separate pockets, each with its own zipper that allows easy access, and with easy segment large enough for a pair of shoes and some socks, multiple shirts, a couple pairs of pants, a camera and accessories, a puffer, hat, and gloves, all the toiletries you’d need for a week, and so on. When I was traveling alone for a multi-day “outdoorsy” trip, I could curate my gear logically by activity and weather. When traveling under more urbane circumstances, I could fold and roll a few button downs into one pocket, slacks in another, dressier shoes for dinner, sneakers for daytime, and so forth.

And once an article of clothing was worn, were it business casual pants or mud-splattered socks, I could tuck the soiled garment into the large, separately accessed compartment into which the individual pockets tuck when filled. 

See, the brilliance of the bag is that it not only offers you all those pockets, but it also offers you a separate space into which you can stash anything you want, be it the stuff formerly in each segment, or, if need be, items far too large to fit in any of the separate sections.

So for most trips where I didn’t need a truly technical hiking pack, meaning one with a proper hip belt, adjustable shoulder straps, lumbar support, compression straps, and all that other load-bearing and comfort related whatnot, this pack became my go-to. 

Then, as we planned two-night family cabin camping trip, it became the family go-to, also. Why? Yeah, you guessed it: everyone got their own pocket. Sure, we needed to put jackets and boots and a few other sundries in a different bag, but the ease of knowing where each kid’s pajamas were for bedtime, fresh clothes were for the morning, spare socks and such were in case needed and so forth made the process of getting up and out each morning and bedded down in the evenings so much easier than it would have been were we digging around in a normal suitcase or duffel.

And sticking everyone’s dirtied clothes in a fully separate compartment? Priceless. 

One last note: if the 42-liter SEG42 Travel Pack is larger than you need for your solo rambles or your smaller family, there’s a smaller SEG30 (yep, 30 liters) and it’s got all the right moves too.