I say to Murray that we should do a test pack to see where we are at with stuff and volume. Murray beats me into our new rather tiny library, spreads his suitcase out on the floor and takes up more than half the floor space with himself and his stuff. I slither by him and plunk myself down beside my bag.
We first gather the clothes we will wear on the plane and pile them up. Then we start to put the remaining clothes into the bags. Yikes! There are more clothes in my airplane pile than there are in my suitcase! See, I get cold on airplanes so all my layers will be on my body endeavoring to keep me warm.
I end up just tossing stuff – hat, swimsuit, flip flops, first aid kit, dive log pages – into my bag without really packing. I rummage through the “for sure” pile under one chair and pull some stuff out that I will carry. Grab my travel wallet, neck safe, money belt, pills, camera battery charger, flashlight, binos and pile them beside my bag not in my bag. This isn’t going so well.
Murray gets stuck on whether to take a warm layer and a rain layer and grinds to a halt too. He is also wondering about how many T shirts to pack. He pulls his stuff from the “for sure” pile and puts is beside his bag. He gets no further than I do with his test pack.
I find the sleep sacks in the “maybe” pile and play with one contemplating whether to pack mine. My gut tells me to take it (remember the bed bugs in the Andamans!) but my packing sense says “Wait and see how your bag looks when you actually pack it for real.
So our test pack accomplished some things and didn’t accomplish others. It organized the stuff in the “for sure” pile. It is too early to do a serious pack as we are still 3 weeks out. It got us thinking about warm layers, rain layers, sleep sacks, shirts.
After abandoning our test pack we left the room looking like this:
The condition of our library after our test pack!