On Packing for Europe. Again.

This is false.

There are, in fact, few things less conducive to happiness than packing for an extended trip. I have recurrent fantasies about casually throwing a few items into a petit carry-on an hour or two before leaving for the airport, strolling through the terminal pulling along only this one little piece of luggage which happens to contain nothing more unusual than some clothing, reading material and noise canceling headphones.

I fantasize about this the way other people fantasize about winning the lottery, their dream wedding, the invention of a motorized Lay-Z-Boy.

The reality this time is nothing on the scale of what it was when we moved for a year. On the Overwhelming Packing Experiences Scale, this time around falls somewhere between the I've-curled-into-a-weeping-ball-of-despair and I-am-actually-willing-to-live-naked-in-the-chicken-coop-for-the-rest-of-my-life-rather-than-do-this of days past. But it's no where near the single, lightweight carry-on of my fantasy.

This time we're maxing out our luggage allotment although I don't really know why that should be. We left so many things in the house in Romania for. the. exact. purpose of being able to travel light when we returned. And, unlike 20 or even 10 years ago, we can get everything once we arrive that we might have forgotten to bring. They have decent laundry soap and shampoo, real toilet paper and dental floss. All of it attainable at the nearest Kaufland or Billa.

I think we fill our suitcases with Costco-sized containers of multivitamins and ibuprofen out of habit. Admittedly filling a suitcase with blocks of Philadelphia cream cheese is an odd habit to get into and one you'd think would be easy to break but apparently no.

Then again, we leave in a matter of hours and, for all of my talk about traveling light, I am not yet packed. Mihai, with his tubs of Co-Enzyme Q10 and 5 pound bags of pistachios, has been done for days. So maybe I've got it all wrong, maybe the trick to being happy as you pack for a vacation far away, is to fill your suitcases with the most random items you can think of and sit back with the knowledge that, no matter what you might encounter at your destination, you are pretty much guaranteed to be prepared for it. 50 people with a headache? Check. Someone feel like making cheesecake for a crowd?  Got that covered. A dog with a flea infestation? Not to worry, the Ionescu's and their baggage have arrived.

If that's the secret then I'm going about this all wrong. Instead of spending all day barking at the boys to photocopy the relevant pages out of their textbooks, I should just let them haul around the whole tome and contentedly play video games for the rest of the day. Rather than agonizing over making judicious selections from my wardrobe ("can this pair of shoes really be worn with six different outfits?"), perhaps the solution is to just open up drawers and dump the contents into the maw of my suitcase until the zipper strains when I try to close it. Then maybe I'd resemble the smiling cartoon character in the image.

If that's the case then I must close this for now. Target is open and I believe there are lawn ornaments, paint rollers and maybe a case of Juice Boxes to purchase.

Happiness, here I come.


PS. We're doing the blog again because we can't seem to simply travel and take photos and leave it at that.
PPS No I never fixed the glitch with the comments. Oops. Sorry Karen C and all the others who complained.