Pack, Pack, Unpack, Pack
I had no idea packing two suitcases each could take so long! We started on Sunday, thinking it was going to be perhaps a two hour process. It has turned into a two day process.
We started by clearing off the bed and then piling up everything we hoped to take with us on it. I wish we had taken a picture of it. What a mess! Let's just say it was a heaping pile that nearly toppled over at several points during the day yesterday.
Then we did a quick initial pack. We had been worried about going over the 70 pound per suitcase limit, but we needn't have worried because the suitcases, even stuffed to the point of potential explosion, still weighed less than 60 pounds.
At this point, Matt decided that our initial packing was good enough. He then tried to stuff the leftover stuff (enough to fill an entire suitcase on its own) into any little corner or air pocket left in the suitcases. That's when the suitcases exploded.
O.K., they didn't explode literally, but we felt like they did. We felt like we were taking way too much stuff. Even trying to open a suitcase was annoying, let alone trying to find something in particular to pull out. We usually pride ourselves on packing light because, from our experience, the lighter you pack the less stress you have while traveling. So, four suitcases that were filled completely to the gills with every air pocket stuffed with random stuff was not the way we wanted to go.
So we unpacked everything. We needed a new game plan.
We decided to re-start our packing adventure by dedicating one suitcase to our trip to London. We will have almost a week in London and it would be a complete pain to get into all the suitcases. So we included a week's worth of clothes for each of us, our London tour books, and extra sets of comfy shoes, and a few books we might want to read. This pretty much filled the suitcase. Once we had our London suitcase packed, we worked on repacking the other three.
The pile on the bed was still too big. We were going to have to weed out some stuff. It turned out, when we recounted our shirts, that we had both tried to pack way too many. So we each cut ours down to about 20 tops (we were shooting for 14 but there we both justified a few extra that we just had to take with us). Then, we each got one suitcase to stuff with our clothes. We made a rule that we could only take it with us if it would fit in these two suitcases.
This left the last suitcase still completely unpacked. We decided to fill it with all the miscellaneous stuff, including pens, stapler, hair gel, paper, Boyd Bears (to make the house warm and personable when we get there), toothbrushes, etc. Surprisingly, we did actually need an entire suitcase for all this extra stuff.
Whew! It's Monday morning now and, besides a few small things that we are going to buy today, we have all four suitcases packed. And though I can't say we exactly packed light, at least we have the usable London suitcase and three others that aren't completely annoying.
We started by clearing off the bed and then piling up everything we hoped to take with us on it. I wish we had taken a picture of it. What a mess! Let's just say it was a heaping pile that nearly toppled over at several points during the day yesterday.
Then we did a quick initial pack. We had been worried about going over the 70 pound per suitcase limit, but we needn't have worried because the suitcases, even stuffed to the point of potential explosion, still weighed less than 60 pounds.
At this point, Matt decided that our initial packing was good enough. He then tried to stuff the leftover stuff (enough to fill an entire suitcase on its own) into any little corner or air pocket left in the suitcases. That's when the suitcases exploded.
O.K., they didn't explode literally, but we felt like they did. We felt like we were taking way too much stuff. Even trying to open a suitcase was annoying, let alone trying to find something in particular to pull out. We usually pride ourselves on packing light because, from our experience, the lighter you pack the less stress you have while traveling. So, four suitcases that were filled completely to the gills with every air pocket stuffed with random stuff was not the way we wanted to go.
So we unpacked everything. We needed a new game plan.
We decided to re-start our packing adventure by dedicating one suitcase to our trip to London. We will have almost a week in London and it would be a complete pain to get into all the suitcases. So we included a week's worth of clothes for each of us, our London tour books, and extra sets of comfy shoes, and a few books we might want to read. This pretty much filled the suitcase. Once we had our London suitcase packed, we worked on repacking the other three.
The pile on the bed was still too big. We were going to have to weed out some stuff. It turned out, when we recounted our shirts, that we had both tried to pack way too many. So we each cut ours down to about 20 tops (we were shooting for 14 but there we both justified a few extra that we just had to take with us). Then, we each got one suitcase to stuff with our clothes. We made a rule that we could only take it with us if it would fit in these two suitcases.
This left the last suitcase still completely unpacked. We decided to fill it with all the miscellaneous stuff, including pens, stapler, hair gel, paper, Boyd Bears (to make the house warm and personable when we get there), toothbrushes, etc. Surprisingly, we did actually need an entire suitcase for all this extra stuff.
Whew! It's Monday morning now and, besides a few small things that we are going to buy today, we have all four suitcases packed. And though I can't say we exactly packed light, at least we have the usable London suitcase and three others that aren't completely annoying.
posted by Jen | 8:30 AM
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