Packing to Go

Yikes! This week we are driving to Colorado for a two-week holiday stay. Since we live in an RV with less than 400 square feet of space, we feel we are living a very simple life—minimalist, almost. Anything we don’t use for a year, we get rid of. We have a place for everything, and everything must be in its place. Otherwise, we don’t have room to do something else.

The flip side is that, every where we go, we take along everything we own. Once before this year we flew to North Carolina for three days. We boarded the cats and lived just fine out of one suitcase.

This time we will be gone about three weeks, when you include our travel time. Some people would cover the 700 miles from Phoenix to Denver in one day. We plan on three days. And we will be traveling with our cats. Taking them with us in the truck is nothing new. Staying in motels for all that time is another matter. We have only done that on one other trip and it wasn’t very fun. And that was 4½ years ago. They are a lot older and more difficult to care for now.

Another issue is what to pack. We have some “dress-up” clothes in storage in Colorado. But what do we need, what can’t we live without and how much do we have room for? We fill the front seat of the truck, the cats take up the rear seat. Whatever we pack needs to go into the tool box in the truck bed or into a plastic tub. One tub will be full of things for the cat—food, medicine, litter, newspaper and plastic to protect the motel floors.

We need to take clothes, computers, our Bibles and prayer books, novels to read, lunch and snacks for at least the first day. We are leaving sunny Arizona, where right now the days are in the 50s and 60s, the nights 30s and 40s, and going to Colorado, with lows in the single digits, highs anywhere from 18 to 40. We need at least one heavy coat each. Normally, that would travel in the trailer. Where does it go now? Thank heavens we mailed all the Christmas gifts, to arrive before we do. We keep reminding ourselves we aren’t going to a wilderness or the North Pole—just a major large city. Anything we need that we don’t pack, we can buy, can’t we?

In past years we have traveled to Europe without our trailer—and we always packed way too much. And that was without computers or cats. This trip is mind boggling. By early tomorrow morning we have to figure it all out.