Paklite Duffel Bag Review and A Quick Trip To Beautiful Orange

A recent quick trip to Orange was just the chance I’d been waiting for.

Paklite, the Australian luggage maker with a 50 year history of making travel goods, had kindly sent me one of their new Escape Duffel bags, a lightweight wheeled soft duffel that is incredibly tough.

My plan had been to do a test drive of the bag, write up this review and then see if I could sell it on as part of my $2015 in 2015 fundraising for World Vision.

Here’s myself and the bag, at the Le Russie Studios after a 4 hour drive from Sydney.

But here’s the thing… I tried it and I really love it and it fills a big gap in my luggage rack… so I won’t be selling it on… but I’ll do my own donation to my World Vision fund as I would definitely buy this bag.

Here’s why:

It’s very lightweight

It’s very well made and tough; I’m all for longevity and quality rather than bargain basement priced pieces

It’s soft and so can be squashed in with other bags and to fit spaces in the bag of the car (hard shell cases are great for putting into the hold flying with delicate items like cameras and laptops and any other breakable, but are a pain to pack when travelling by car, bus, tuk tuk, donkey etc etc *

Love the colours, mine is the spring green, and there’s warm rust and statement black too.

I really like the handles, on the top and on the side, so you can easily pick it up (unlike a hard shell suitcase in my experience) and chuck it into the car or whatever.

Pockets: there’s an internal mesh zipped pocket all along one side inside, and a zipped pocket along the full length outside too. Very handy.

The Paklite Escape Duffel comes in three different sizes:

Small:     25 x 48 x 27cm 32L  1.9kg

Medium: packing volume of 61 x 28 x 29cm  50L   2.4kg

Large: packing volume  32 x 71 x 33cm weight  75L   2.8kg

Paklite’s RRP for the three sizes are:  $159, $179 and $198 however you can find them much cheaper online e.g. for $79, $89 and $99 on Peter’s of Kensington website here.

In my medium bag I easily managed to pack everything I needed for a short getaway, with space left over.

The small bag is suitable as cabin baggage  – very tempting indeed.

For an overseas trip, I’d use the larger one for sure.

Read more about the Paklite Escape Duffel Bag range on the Paklite website here.

The twins and I stopped in Orange on our road trip to and from Dubbo Zoo, so I knew the town a bit (see Road Trip to Dubbo Things To Do and Accom)

On Monday afternoon, I hugely enjoyed a wander around the wide streets of central Orange, wandering into some gorgeous homeware stores and checking out my fave cafe from last time, Scrumptious on Summer. Love the notices on the wall, see below.

We had dinner that night at Union Bank Wine Bar, very lovely.

By 7.30am next morning I was at the Orange Aquatic Centre doing a few calming laps. I LOVE exploring the swimming pools of country towns. All of life – and water polo teams – is there.

I saw a girl with the most gorgeous butterfly tattoos on her legs but was too chicken to ask if I could take a photo.

And that was the start of another hot summer day in country NSW. We had brekkie and then went off to check out the boarding school. Post on that and own experiences boarding for the last two years of school are on this boarding school post.

So apologies that I will be hanging onto this beautiful bag. I’m off to donate some money to my $2015 in 2015 as a penance.

Hope that you are planning your own short break away soon.

Where are you planning to go?

Where are you day dreaming about going?

Happy planning and packing