on packing
I love packing, usually.
Spontaneity and surprises are nice, but half the fun for me is the anticipation. Packing for a trip is an excuse to anticipate all sorts of things, while figuring out how to fit x stuff into x space in a way that is convenient, efficient, etc. A delightful little puzzle, it is. And for this particular journey, I get to factor in money, too (ditch the shampoo in favor of an extra bottle of Clear Care contact lens solution, that sort of thing).
I loaded up my bigger piece of luggage just beautifully. I’m pretty sure there was zero air inside. I even sat on it a couple times. And it worked; everything fit.
The most compactly packed suitcase ever
But I forgot to factor in weight, and it turned out to be a beastly sixty-six pounds. No good. So last night I set out to pack the rest of my stuff, like toothpaste and towels and school supplies, in the smaller red suitcase (courtesy of Maggie. Thanks Mags!), and also to get the big one down to fifty pounds. The latter task involved removing all my shoes, jackets/coat, and several clothing items. The pile of stuff for the red suitcase was big enough already; now it was huge. One look at it and I was stressed out and not at all excited to be packing.
You might be wondering why I wouldn’t ditch half the stuff and buy what I need in England instead of hauling it across the ocean. Good travelers pack light, yes? And, as the saying goes, you can’t travel heavy, happy, and cheap. But this isn’t really travel; this is moving. I’m not going to just be wandering around Oxford checking out the sights. We have to actually do real life there. Real life in England is expensive, especially when your bank account is in dollars instead of pounds. And so I’m willing to spend a couple highly inconvenient days on the road if it means my student loans are smaller in the long run.
All of the above means that I wasn’t very happy about the prospect of ditching anything on my list, so I was sitting there cramming my bag with a scowl on my face and a swirl of exchange rates and overweight baggage fees going through my head. My mom finally commented, “You seem a bit testy,” to which I roared, “YES I AM!”
Turns out that it actually wasn’t that big of a deal. When it was all said and done, the big one weighed forty-eight pounds and the smaller one forty-nine (with no repacking required!), and I emerged as the winner of the bring-as-much-as-possible-without-paying-more-money game.
That philosophy might not serve me well in the end, but so far so good.
