Ex Officio Give-N-Go® Underwear
12/27/2008 at 21:58 from (47.683479, -122.266725)
To prepare for living out of a backpack for the better part of a year, we've started buying and acquiring items intended to make our lives as comfortable as possible, given the circumstances. We figured the best place to start was with the goods that we'll have the most intimate contact with: our undies.
As it turns out, it's not so easy to marry comfort with long-term international travel, and that goes double for travel done on the cheap. We're saddled -- quite literally -- with whatever we can carry on our backs. Obviously, this poses a substantial limit on the number of conveniences we can bring along. Every piece of clothing or technology we pack will have to be schlepped along for thousands of miles, so our value per gram had better be high.
The easiest ways to maximize this golden ratio are to:
- pack items with multiple uses
- pack items that are lighter
- pack fewer, more reusable duplicate items
Generally speaking, the first two points don't apply well to clothing. A sock, for example, is eminently multi-use, but I'm not keen on wearing a used one as a head band. And, while we'll pack the lightest clothes we can, shorts and t-shirts don't vary much by weight. What we're left with, then, is a strategy of minimizing the number of clothes we pack while maximizing their durability and reusability.
On a trip like ours, minimizing the size of our clothes pile is a function of how long we can wear a given item before it's clearly soiled and how quickly said item can dry after being washed. An item that wears long and dries fast allows us to pack fewer redundancies for those overlapping periods when we're drying clothes, but still want to... you know... do stuff.
Ex Officio claims that their line of underwear is perfect for this purpose, wicking away moisture and drying quickly. Anybody who's ever had to endure tropical humidity in cotton boxers and jeans will readily understand the value of unmentionables that don't store up your sweat like some sort of pants camel. The gains in mobility and odor simply can't be stressed enough.
Clearly, the camisoles belong to Marijana. She loves them for their comfort and simplicity. They happen to have a built-in bra, which saves a little room and weight and bra line aesthetic. They also seem to be pretty breatheable, which is especially important since it's not considered feminine to be drenched in one's own sweat when meeting strangers.
The BVDs are mine.
Typically, I'm a boxer man and enjoy the relative freedom of a life unbound. However, since we'll be doing a fair amount of walking in equatorial humidity, I thought it would make sense to get the lightest, thinnest undies available. Boxers -- espcially the cotton variety -- have a tendency to bind, twist, sponge up sweat, and reek in mere minutes. Besides, I'll spend much of my time in shorts. Boxers just didn't make very much sense. We'll see if this was an intelligent decision.
As the months wear on, so will these undies. We'll be putting them through a rigorous regimen of impact, duration, and (with luck!) friction testing. In the name of science, we'll also compare the wear and drying abilities of these undergarments with our existing intimate things. We'll report our impressions as time goes on, eventually giving a conclusive review as to the efficacy of these purportedly perfect skivvies.
Try to guess which days we're wearing them!