Planning a round-the-world trip, a long-term trip or just a short getaway for a weekend and you’re still looking for the perfect travel backpack that will follow you everywhere? Well we may have the right solution for you! We instantly fell in love with the Hedgren Connect range when we heard about it and it didn’t take us long before wanting to try out the Hedgren Junction model during our travels. We’ve been taking it everywhere with us for over a year now and it is time to share with you our impressions on this handy travel backpack!

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The Hedgren Connect range

Launched in 2015, the Connect range is one of the latest by Hedgren, a Belgian brand that has been specialized in leather goods for more than 20 years. Given the current trends and new habits of 2.0 travelers, they wanted to answer a quite common problem  we have nowadays : how to travel and easily carry all your high-tech equipment? That’s how the Hedgren Connect range came to life, with several products ranging from the small carrying case to the larger backpack. As travel bloggers, we have become accustomed to traveling with a lot of high tech equipment and the Hedgren Junction immediately appeared as the ideal solution to simply and safely carry all our equipment.

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The Hedgren Junction travel backpack

Without turning us into teleshopping vendors, let’s start by briefly telling you about the backpack itself and its features. The Hedgren Junction is no larger than a regular everyday backpack and is divided into 2 large compartments closed by zippers. The larger of the two has a zip safe that’s made to keep thieves away. There are also several dedicated compartments in the backpack that can hold a laptop (up to 15 inches), a tablet (up to 10 inches), 2 smartphones, an external battery and a GoPro like action camera. Moreover, the Hedgren Junction has a wide variety of pockets available everywhere. There are 2 on the front of the bag, a small one that’ll land against your back (perfect for slipping important papers such as a boarding pass) and an independent pocket fixed on the shoulder strap. It’s ideal for keeping passport and wallet handy. Finally, there’s a small strap available on the second strap to fix audio headphones. The video below provides a good overview of all the options you’ll find on the Hedgren Junction:

Our review of the Hedgren Junction

It’s been a year since we first started to take the Hedgren Junction around with us during our travels (in Switzerland, Portugal or the Netherlands) so we can now give you a proper review. We know the Hedgren Junction very well since we used it by various types of weather and temperatures. To simply put it : we love this travel backpack! It’s handy, clean and above all very well thought out (such as the small slots allowing to move from one compartment to another by the inside, perfect to recharge batteries!). We’ll be honest : it took us a little while to get used to it and figure out what everything was for but now that we got there, it feels impossible to picture ourselves travelling without it!

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It perfectly suits a day of explorations for two and can contain a few extra little things like a small bottle of water or documentation for example. Sometimes, we really had to load it a lot for bus rides or taking the plane but it remains pleasant to wear thanks to its padded shoulder straps and its attachment on the chest which allows a better distribution of the weight. So far it has managed to resist the deluge in the Alhambra, the snow of the Diablerets or the sun of Lisbon and still is in a very good condition. However, the external battery is more difficult to figure out. It’s really not easy to turn off which often got on our nerves. Moreover, it already shows some weaknesses and fails to completely charge itself. But it may also have something to do with our intensive use of social media and videos on our phones, especially when we are in blogtrip!

This article is the result of a collaboration with Hedgren for which we did not, under any circumstance, receive any form of payment. All opinions expressed here are ours and have not been subject to the influence of any third party.