Duffels.com

Yes, I am referring to Athalon’s duffel as a “he.”

You see, I’ve always been slightly biased against duffel bags since I saw (and consequently fell in love with) the Lindsey Lohan remake of “The Parent Trap” as a child. You see, in one of the opening scenes, her duffel bag gets thrown into the bottom of a dog pile of the strange packing containers and after that my subconscious must’ve attached the ideas of “duffel bag” and “getting-squished-to-death-retrieving-your-stuff” and never managed to completely recover. And it didn’t stop there.

Any camp movie was enough to make me think cabins, bug spray and duffel bags. Be it 1995’s “Heavyweights,” or the Olson twins’ “It Takes Two,” I still can’t get the image of stacks and stacks of duffel bags being loaded off of buses out of my head!

Now I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a phobia, but I was always the kid who chose to take a wheeled suitcase or who stuffed a backpack so tightly the zippers sometimes exploded rather than resorting to the classic duffle.

Over the last few years I’ve started to understand that duffels do not have to be synonymous with luggage mountains or the sports duffels of traveling soccer teams in matching Adidas warm-ups.

Yet I had never met a duffle that caught my eye and called out to me. That is until I was wandering around the office and bumped into this little fella who decided he was not going to blend in.

Nope, this duffle had a swagger from day one. And that’s why I love him so.