I finally get the packing bug. I print off the “House Sitter” list, the “Before Leaving” list and our packing list. All these can be found under “Packing Lists” on the Menu bar of the blog. I have pasted the Clothing, Important Travel Documents, First Aid, Other Stuff, Scuba Diving and Toiletries lists onto one Excel spreadsheet so it prints on one page. We find this is much easier to deal with.
A lovely young university student comes over for a visit to chat about house sitting while we are gone. She house sat for some friends of ours this summer and our friends were thrilled with the care she took with their home and their cherished pet. So, we are very fortunate to be given her name and excited about having her stay in our house. I print off the list to make sure it is all relevant and to add new items – like how to wash our brand new flooring and NOT to vaccuum the new area rug in the front entrance. I learned very quickly that the vaccuum likes to chew up the rug at break neck speed and spew green fluff everywhere.
I don’t look to closely at the “Before Leaving” list except to glance at it. Too early still.
Now for packing. I sit down with the list and cross off everything I think is a definite “NOT GOING”. Stuff like umbrella, journal, iPod, drawing materials, running gear, sandals, sarong and most of the dive gear.
Murray and I have decided to make two packing piles in our library. HOORAH! We no longer have to lay out everything in our living room. We have a new library upstairs (my daughter’s old bedroom) and we can now lay out trip stuff in there. The two piles are a MAYBE pile and a FOR SURE pile. The MAYBE pile is stuff we need to think about and may get eliminated to try to keep weight and volume down. Here is the maybe pile so far.
The MAYBE Pile
Under the chair is our underwater camera housing and accessories, dive log books, dry bag, and Murray’s do-rag . On the chair are our sleep sacks, a cigarette lighter battery charger, a baggie of Canada pins etc and a couple of plastic containers.
The FOR SURE pile looks like this so far…….
The FOR SURE Pile
It has cameras, lens, wallets, soap, drugs, some of my clothes, our “purses” and some other small stuff. We have a box in our closet with all sorts of travel gear in it. We pull the box down, root through it and the pile starts growing.
We are starting to pack!
In my next posts, I will talk about the conundrum I have with what “purse” to take and clothes for an African safari.