Nick Lachey and Vanessa Minnillo have been on a grueling travel schedule going back and forth between New York and Los Angeles. These two are really putting in the effort, and Lachey proves once again he is a gentleman by carrying his girlfriend’s giant Louis Vuitton bag loaded with 300 pounds of necessities to keep her beautiful and well dressed. Minnillo only packs what Lachey can carry.

That’s a wild dress. Kind of looks like a maze.

For the past two months, Nick Lachey, 32, and Vanessa Minnillo, 25, have behaved like, well, a couple of newlyweds! What’s Vanessa’s appeal?

“She’s a guys’ girl,” says a friend of the couple. “Jessica was always about going somewhere that was a scene with a big entourage. Vanessa can play darts and chill.” Minnillo also scores points for being a fellow sports nut. Whereas Simpson rolled her eyes at Lachey’s passion, Minnillo revels in it.

In fact, when she and Lachey were still in the platonic friendship stage, “Nick commented on his love for the [hometown NFL team], Cincinnati Bengals and Vanessa blew him away by running off the team’s poor stats,” says a Lachey source. “He tells friends, ‘It’s like talking to your best guy friend, but she’s a smoking-hot chick.’”

On a snarkier, note, a Minnillo pal adds, “Nick keeps telling Vanessa the difference between her and Jessica is that she is extremely intelligent.”

There are 4 more much cuter pictures of these two in the gallery after the jump…

Nick Lachey wasn’t ready for his close-up early Friday morning. Younes Renak, 18, an Upper East Side native home for the summer from Penn State, claims Lachey roughed him after he tried to snap a cellphone picture of the pretty-boy singer around 2 a.m. Renak says Lachey went bonkers and began pushing him around inside an elevator at the fashiona ble Rivergate apartment building on East 34th Street where Lachey’s TV hottie girlfriend, Vanessa Minnillo, lives. “It was a cellphone [camera], it wasn’t a paparazzi kind of thing,” Renak’s lawyer, Saul Bienenfeld, told The Post’s David K. Li. “We’re talking about an 18-year-old kid taking in life in the big city.” He said Renak might sue. But reps for the ex-Mr. Jessica Simpson say Renak started pestering Lachey at a drugstore and then followed him into the building and the elevator. “We believe it was a lot more than a young man trying to take a picture,” said Lachey’s lawyer. Mitch Schuster. His publicist, Ken Sunshine raged, “This harassment with camera phones – it’s just out of control.” Renak says he still has his cellphone and pictures of Nick, although he declined to share them with us.

Vanessa Minnillo’s door guys at her residence have said Nick is not as nice as some of her previous boyfriends. Nick just isn’t a gushy metrosexual who lets everyone walk all over him. Nick stands his ground, and won’t take crap when someone oversteps their boundaries. The teenager with the camera-phone most likely knew he was pushing his luck, especially considering it was 2 a.m., and Nick let him know enough was enough. I believe Nick’s recollection of the events, and he was most likely coming home from visiting his girlfriend, so he has a reason to be coming home at 2 a.m. Why was this kid out at 2 a.m.? That kid had was trespassing the minute he got into the elevator with Nick, especially since he probably does not live in that building. This story might get even more interesting if someone investigates this kid in more detail.