I’m currently on a three country, two and a half week solo guitar tour in Europe. The method of travel is completely different from my stateside CVB and tours with our crew and a comfortable tour bus.  Instead I seem to be flying somewhere every other day—from Italy to the island of Sardinia, back to Italy, off to Spain for two days, back to Italy, and then over to England for a week.

Everywhere you go these days the various airlines have a new and completely different policy. On Ryan Air your total checked luggage cannot weigh more than 15 kilos. On Meridiana there’s no worries at all. On Alitalia your carry-on luggage cannot weigh more than 8 Kilos.  This is ridiculous because that comes to 17.63 pounds and my extremely tiny 10" X 10" pedalboard weighs about 14 lbs! So I have the humiliating job of emptying out my carry-on stuff and transferring various items to my checked luggage right there on the floor in front of the check-in desk.

At that moment I can’t help noticing that the next guy in line weighs at least 250 lbs, maybe more. My total carry-on and personal weight doesn't come close to that, so why should the airlines even care?  We didn’t seem to have any problems getting airborne. Big or small, heavy or light, the plane will fly . . .