My favorite things: Opsrey Talon 22 daypack

I'm on a backpack roll here - I hope you don't mind.

Last week I talked about my beloved North Face Napali 50 pack for traveling.  It's great for carrying all your stuff, but this isn't the kind of thing I want to carry with me while I'm out and about looking at the sights, out on a day hike, crouched on a tiny plastic stool with a 40-cent beer at a bia hoi, or crashing a funeral.

For these things, I have another backpack that I rely on:  the Osprey Talon 22.  This is my favorite backpack of all time.  I might be in love with it.  If someone stole this thing, I would be much more upset at losing the bag itself than any of its contents.

I bought my beloved little backpack back in 2008 to take on a last-minute trip to visit a friend that had just moved to Hawaii.  My plans involved lots and lots of day hikes (I'm not a huge chill-on-the-beach-for-days person, plus I'm ghostly white with a sunscreen allergy), so I was in need of a tough but comfortable daypack.  Holy mai tais, did the Osprey ever make my day.

The straps are unbelievably comfortable, and they come with a mini-pocket on each one.  If you have an old-school cell phone, it'll totally fit in one of the pockets.  I drank the smart phone Kool-Aid a few years ago, so I stash my phone in one of the 2 mesh pockets on the hip belt and keep an LED flashlight stored in one of the strap pockets.

The back ventilation is top-notch, it includes an internal sleeve for a hydration bladder, it has side pockets for holding drink bottles, and it has a stretchy outside pocket that's perfect for storing your fleece or raincoat.  The zippers are tough but easy to move, and the backpack material is super tough. And thanks to its smart overall design, the bulk of the pack sits away from my arms so that I never rub against it while I'm out and about.

To put this as bluntly as possible, this daypack is downright amazing, and any daypack you might own is completely inferior. Boy, I wish Osprey was paying me to say that, but they aren't.  They just impressed the hell out of me.

I've taken this pack to Hawaii, Chile, California, South Korea, and South Africa.  I've hauled it on countless camping trips, hikes, and bike rides (hey, speaking of biking, it even has a built-in thingy to attach a blinker light).  It's still in great shape. The Talon also comes in other sizes, too:

       

You might have noticed that the Talon series is a tad on the expensive side.  But you totally get what you pay for.  I paid full price for my Talon 22 (something I rarely do - I'm a discount whore).  It was SO worth it.

I ordered what?

Trying local cuisine is a fundamental part of travel to a new place.  If you go to Memphis without having BBQ, Belgium without trying the chocolates, Naples without noshing on the pizza, or Mauritius without drinking the coconut tea, your experience will be woefully incomplete.  A few years back, I realized the fun in ordering or buying something without having a clue as to what it actually is.  While backpacking through Bulgaria with a friend, we bought what we assumed would be a plain piece of bread at a market.  Upon tearing into it, we discovered that it was filled with cheese.  Cheese! Brilliant!  We immediately dubbed our find "Bread Surprise" and decided that we must shop at more markets to see what else we could discover lurking inside innocent pieces of bread.  We found jams, fruit, herb concoctions, and more cheese inside our purchases as we played this game throughout the country.  We were actually rather disappointed to tear into one particular chunk of bread to find it... utterly devoid of anything extra.  Well.  How boring.  Hmph.

I tried this again recently in Paris at a nice restaurant.  Upon looking over the entrees, I decided to pick one whose description bore not a single word that I could translate.  (I don't speak a lick of French to begin with).  What did I end up with?  Scallops!  And they were fabulous.

I don't have a 100% success rate, though.  At a tiki bar in Hawaii, I once again played the food surprise game.  I saw something called "tako poki" on the menu.  There was no explanation, I found the name pretty laughable, and I immediately envisioned Homer Simpson amusing himself by constantly poking at a beef taco at a Mexican restaurant.   That vision quickly vanished when this was placed in front of me:

WTF is that and why did the chef forget to cook it?  Seriously.  Waitress...?  I think my dinner is trying to crawl out of the bowl...?

It turns out that tako poki is marinated octopus.  I like to consider myself a decently adventurous eater, but the tako poki won this battle.  The dish was rather tentacle-heavy, and I would have been able to stomach more of it had the tentacles not been so, well, tentacle-y.  Thank God for that Mai Tai that I ordered.  At least I could have a liquid dinner.  Bottoms up!