Gear: Shirts and Pants

Little did I know how difficult it would be to find 2 pairs of pants and 2 shirts. Apparently, an unspoken rule of designing light weight/travel clothing made of quick-dry material is that if you are going to use those materials the clothes themselves either have to have some kind of hideous pattern (in the case of shirts) or (in the case of pants) be completely off the wall, ie. dozens of pockets, zippers, and mounds of excess material to make things excessively baggy. The trade off for finding any 'normal' pants/shirts that are quick-dry and pack light is that you have to pay twice the price as you would for the shirts/pants mentioned above. My experience and frustration comes from trying on about two plus dozen pants and shirts over the weekend, and luckily after all that I did manage to settle on two pants, one long sleeve shirt and one short sleeve shirt.

The first pair of pants comes from Patagonia, the Patagonia Sol Patrol Pant: light, wrinkle-free, quick drying, and very comfortable for hot weather. After wearing them around for a day, I've been pleasantly surprised at how comfortable they are. Pant number two is the Prana Traveler Pant, a very comfortable pair of mostly cotton pants, which packs light and is very functional.

As for shirts, we went with the Prana Bandana Print short-sleeve and the Mountain Hardwear Compass Shirt longsleeve. The Bandana Print shirt certainly falls outside the realm of my normal 'style', but after some outside consulting I decided to take the plunge. It's has a nice material blend, wears comfortably, and is a good color that won't show dirt too readily. One of the main reasons for going with the Prana shirt is that apparently most 'travel' shirts are made for a race of people where a small is considered to be 200lbs, meaning I was swimming in the excess of even the small sized shirts of most other brands. The Compass Shirt was actually a bit of a gamble...I ordered it without actually trying it on. Based on the other Mountain Hardwear shirt I tried on, the size and fit should be good, but we'll find out in a week or so I suppose.