Caching and stashing (think: traveling without packing)

I saw a tweet a few days ago from Tim Ferris (of The 4-Hour Workweek fame), praising Sean Bonner’s recent post on Practical Urban Caching.  The idea is that when you travel regularly to certain destinations, you shouldn’t have to pack.  If you are heading repeatedly to a certain location, the key is to find a way to store what you need there on the ground, instead of carrying it with you from wherever you are and then back home again.
For example, my wife and I make several trips a year to visit her parents and relatives near Pittsburgh.  This last Thanksgiving I made the trip with my rucksack and the small carry-all I now use.  Even with this light load, however, I was itching.  I wanted to go lighter.  Bonner’s caching concept fits the bill perfectly, and the next time Kira and I head north I will have packed a bag specifically to be left behind at her folk’s house when we return to Memphis.
A few months back, REI had a clearance sale and I stocked up on duplicates of some of the pants and shirts that I like, so I already have some extras I could use as a basic wardrobe to build on.  Most of the trips we make are 2 – 4 days, so a couple extra shirts and one extra pair of pants on-site should do the trick.  I’ll need to stock a couple extra pairs of underwear and undershirts, and get the toiletries and such figured out.  What this means, ultimately, is that I will be able to get on the plane without a bag, and not feel the pinch one bit.  Heaven.
Bonner does raise an important issue, however: What about cities and locales where one doesn’t have the benefit of parents or friends to stash the cache between trips?  An interesting solution came in the comments to the post.  A reader named Marc Nathan wrote about a company he had worked with as a startup called SpareFoot.com.  The company is designed to help broker arrangements between folks who have storage space (of all types and sizes – from large warehouses to the corner of an attic) and folks who need storage space.  Nathan suggested that, though the service had not been specifically designed for urban caching applications, that this was a perfect use of SpareFoot.  (Addendum: it looks like another reader has taken this idea and parleyed it into a potential business venture.)
The downside to such an approach, of course, is that it could get expensive rather quickly.
I’ve been thinking this through for the past couple days, and the more I think about it, the more it calls for a radical approach to one’s travel ethics.  Let’s call it “relational travel” – the idea being that, if I am going to travel to a location enough times to want to cache something there, then I better darn well be meeting people and building relationships on the ground such that someone would let me stash a bag at their place for retrieval on my next visit.
This means traveling less like a tourist and more like a human being.  It’s a style of travel I have long seen work well for some of my good friends (one in particular has spent major portions of the past few years exploring Korea and Thailand, moving slowly and living cheaply, and building networks of friends and acquaintances along the way.  I have been with him when he has struck up conversations with perfect strangers on the street or in a restaurant.  Not in a creepy way, either.  Just human and friendly.  I am convinced that, through practice, he has learned the art of being able to talk to anybody).
Caching is a practical reason, therefore, for the type of “experiential travel” practices preached by folks like Greg Sullivan and Joe Diaz over at AFAR magazine.  Think about it this way: the stronger a connection you make with people over time, the lighter your load when you travel.
Now that’s a goal worth working toward.