The only three cables you need in your travel bag

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For years my travel charging kit was a tangled brick of cables, three wall bricks, and at least one adapter for a device I no longer owned. It weighed more than a pair of shoes. Last year I rebuilt it from scratch with one rule: nothing goes in unless it does more than one job.

The kit is now three cables and one wall charger, and I have not once been stuck without power.

The three cables

One USB-C to USB-C, six feet. This is the workhorse. Six feet matters more than people expect. Hotel outlets are behind the nightstand, airport outlets are at ankle height, and a three foot cable turns both into a problem.

One three-in-one cable. USB-C, Lightning, and micro-USB from a single head. It handles the partner's phone, the older headphones, and whatever a friend forgot. This one cable is what let me delete four others.

One short USB-C, one foot. For the battery pack, so the whole thing sits in a jacket pocket without a loop of slack hanging out. This is the cable I almost cut from the list and now use most.

Six feet at the wall, one foot at the pocket. Everything in between was redundant.

The one wall charger

A single 65W GaN charger with two USB-C ports and one USB-A. It charges a laptop at full speed, or a laptop slowly and two phones at once. It replaced three bricks and is smaller than any one of them.

The specification that matters is the wattage and the port count, not the brand. Anything at 60W or above with two USB-C ports will do the same job.

What got left at home

• The dedicated laptop charger. Redundant once the GaN brick arrived.
• A second battery pack. I have never used the first one down to empty on a trip.
• The travel power strip. Useful for a family, overkill for one person.
• Every micro-USB cable. The three-in-one covers the rare case.

Packing it

The whole kit lives in one small pouch that goes in the same pocket of the same bag every trip. That consistency is doing as much work as the gear reduction. I have never once searched for the pouch, because it is never anywhere else.

Would I change anything

One thing. I am testing whether a second short cable is worth carrying so the battery pack can charge while something else charges from it. If it earns its place, this post gets updated rather than replaced.