New gear: Evergoods Civic Travel Bag 20L

After over fifteen years as a faithful travel companion, I’m retiring my beloved 28L Patagonia Refugio backpack. The shoulder strap started tearing off and I’m too embarrassed to take it to the dry cleaner for another repair.

The 20L Evergoods Civic Travel Bag is its replacement. Interestingly, it seems to have a very similar functional volume to the Patagonia bag. I am extremely confused about how backpack manufacturers measure the volume of their backpacks.

I settled upon the Civic Travel Bag after a couple months of research, and a failed purchase of the Aer Travel Pack 3 Small. My key criteria:

• Form factor. It could be no larger than the Patagonia backpack. I use this backpack as my personal bag during travel and it has to fit under the seat in front of me. As I discovered with the Aer bag, inches matter.
• Dedicated laptop access. I didn’t want to spill everything out of the main compartment when I wanted to get my iPad or laptop out.
• Small top compartment. Dedicated access to a smaller compartment for my AirPods, passport, etc.
• Professional setting-friendly. I also need to use the bag as my daily bag to meetings during work travel.
• Holds a 32 oz water bottle. Staying hydrated during long-haul flights is one of my jet lag prevention tricks. My Patagonia bag was flexible enough to fit a 32 oz Nalgene in its main compartment. While this isn’t quite true for the Evergoods, I found a narrow 32 oz bottle that fits in its exterior water bottle pocket.

AI was helpful-ish in my search. I think I came across the Evergoods brand thanks to Gemini. However, it also provided a lot of suggestions that didn’t really meet my criteria so I still did plenty of manual digging. The OneBag community on Reddit helped me the most, especially their crowdsourced spreadsheet which was invaluable for considering a range of options.

My one hesitation about the Evergoods bag: it is much stiffer than my Patagonia backpack. I think it will be fine in the long term but it’s made me realize how I much appreciated my Patagonia’s soft duffel-like nature.

A final note on the Aer Travel Pack 3 Small: it’s too big as a personal item. Obvious in hindsight, but not obvious if you’re shopping based on volume. I loaded it up for a recent trip, gave it one last look before going to the airport, and rightfully got cold feet as I realized I wasn’t going to get it past the gate agent. Nor was it going to give me any space at my feet.