Suitcase Overboard! (Again)

We've replaced one of our suitcases. Again. Our large suitcase, which we use as a checked bag primarily when we're traveling with lots of hiking gear, was falling apart. The zipper on the front pocket broke, leaving the pocket gaping open. I pinned it shut with a handful of safety pins to nurse it through our trip to West Virginia and North Carolina a few weeks ago. That worked okay (we don't use that pocket anyway) but that wasn't the only problem. The handle on top was starting to pull loose and the wheels frequently would not orient correctly when rolling it upright.



I wrote again because this suitcase didn't have a long tenure with us. It's just over a year old. We bought it on a trip in Colorado in July '22 when we tossed out our large suitcase that had started to break. Ordinarily we'd have nursed it through that trip and probably through one more after that, but it didn't fit in our assigned rental car anyway. We bought a new one later that trip, in time to pack it up for our flight home. Now that one's starting to fall apart, and we agreed to replace it soon.

We checked a Wal-Mart on our trip; we visited to buy a few supplies anyway. The cheapest models started at around $90 but had poor quality. We checked two department stores, too... and found luggage at $300 the price with seemingly little or no better quality. We looked online, too, and found the same story. A break came when we tried a discounter store this past weekend, on a whim.



Among all the flimsy but oh-so-of-the-moment fashionable suitcases we found a few more traditional models that were sturdier— and from brand names we recognized. Oh, and they were inexpensively priced at $90-100. We poked and prodded this London Fog model pictured alongside an American Tourister and a Ricardo Beverly Hills, a brand we've had great results with in the past 15 years.

The London Fog was an inch smaller but looked and felt slightly better made (especially with sturdy bolts affixing the top handle, a place where our no-name bag was pulling apart after just 7 or 8 trips. The color is... easy to spot on an airport baggage claim conveyor belt. 😅 Best of all, it was the cheapest of the lot at $90. We bought it.

A part of me wondered if we should spend more than $90 (the same as we paid for the previous one, IIRC) and get a suitcase that lasts more than 7-8 trips. Two things: 1) We shopped more carefully for this bag. Last year we were "solving for time". This year we solved for quality. 2) Paying more is no guarantee of getting more. The suitcases we saw selling for 3-4x the price didn't seem to be of any better quality. It's like everything's cheap, fashionable, and disposable nowadays.

Making Pork Schnitzel from a Costco Kit

One of the nice things about shopping at Costco is their wide variety of ready-to-cook meals. Some of them are on the basic end of the range, like packages of pre-seasoned meat. At the opposite end are meal kits, with multiple ingredients and/or side dishes included in a package. One that caught my eye on a shopping trip two weeks ago was this German-style pork schnitzel.



The kit includes the ingredients for what's in the picture: pre-cooked pork cutlets, breading to coat them (and pan-fry them), and mushroom gravy to serve with them.

Not everybody's interested in looking through pics of the prep work so I'll put those behind a spoiler guard. Skip down to the finished result if you prefer!

( Unboxing and prep steps (click/tap to expand) )

Here's the finished meal.



The spaetzle (a German style egg noodle pasta) and wine are sold separately. 😅

Other than that, the result looks pretty much like the picture on the box. That's a good thing! Too often with these ready-to-eat meals and meal kits what you get at the end of the process looks like a very sad version of the pics on the box.

But how does it taste? Well, that's where the news is not so good. It tastes bland.

The pork cutlets, the main part of the dish, are tough, dense, and flavorless. The breading turned out to stick on fairly well even though there was no batter with it. It adds a bit of crunchy texture... but alas no real flavor. And the delicate flavor of the mushroom gravy completely disappears when paired with the pork. I found it was more enjoyable mopping up with the spaetzle I added.

Would I buy this again? No. But it does inspire me to try making schnitzel on my own. I mean, this kit shows that it can't be that hard. The only time savings it offered was not having to a) cut and sauté pork or chicken, and b) make mushroom gravy. I can buy mushroom gravy in a jar or make it from a package, so there's not a lot of savings there.