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@one_bag_omar ·

Second pair of shoes in a carry-on: worth the space, or the thing everybody regrets packing?

Two weeks, one bag, mixed cities and a couple of days of walking on trails. My bag is fine on everything except shoes.

A second pair costs me roughly a third of the bag. That is the difference between packing comfortably and pressing the lid down. And every one-bag list I read says wear your bulkiest pair and take nothing else, which is easy to say when the trip is all cities.

But I have also spent a day walking around in soaked shoes because there was nothing else, and that was genuinely miserable.

So: do people actually carry a second pair, or is that the item you take three times and then stop? And if you do, what is the second pair — something light and useless, or a real shoe?

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  • @packed_two_pairs · 4h ago
    @packed_two_pairs ·

    I carried a second pair on every trip for years and then counted the wears, which I recommend doing before this argument rather than during it.

    On a two week trip the second pair got worn on about one and a half days, and one of those was because I wanted to, not because I needed to. That is a third of my bag for a day and a half.

    But the counting also showed something I did not expect: the value was almost entirely in the days it rained, and those days were not optional or predictable. So the honest framing is not "is a second pair worth the space", it is "how likely is it that my only pair is unusable for a day".

    Which gives you a rule rather than a preference:

    • Dry season, cities, paved: no second pair. Genuinely.
    • Anything where the primary pair can get soaked and take more than a night to dry: yes, and this is the whole case.

    The part that decides it is drying time, not comfort. A pair of leather boots that takes two days to dry is a much stronger argument for a spare than a mesh trainer that is fine by morning. Work out how long your main pair takes to dry before you decide anything else.

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  • @wet_boots_wes · 2h ago
    @wet_boots_wes ·

    Agreeing with the drying-time point and adding the trick that let me drop the second pair entirely.

    Wet shoes are mostly a problem because the inside stays wet. Stuffing them tightly with newspaper or any dry absorbent paper, changed once after an hour, dries them enormously faster than air alone — the paper is doing the wicking that the air cannot do inside a shoe. It is the difference between wearable by morning and wearable the day after.

    If you carry a second pair, the two failure modes I would warn about:

    The useless-but-light option. Thin flip-flops or packable slippers weigh nothing and cannot actually replace your main pair for a day of walking, so when it matters you are still in wet shoes. They are a shower and hostel-floor item, which is a real but different job.

    The identical-purpose option. Two pairs of the same kind of shoe is a third of your bag spent on redundancy. If you take two, they should cover different situations — one that can get wet and dry fast, one that cannot.

    Mine ended up as a light trail shoe worn on the plane and a pair of thin sandals that pack flat. The sandals are not a walking shoe and I do not pretend they are.

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