Travel

10 days, 5,218 miles, 1 Camry. That was the challenge for our epic “Go West” road trip vacation this year. When I get asked about our trip, moms especially ask, “How do you pack for that?”

*I charted and planned our trip using the app InRoute. I highly recommend it. You’ll need to subscribe for $5/month while you’re using it but canceling was easy when we were done.*

That was difficult. Not only because of limited space but because we stayed at a hotel every night except nights 3 & 4 when we stayed in a wall tent at a guest ranch in Kalispell, Montana. I didn’t want to lug out large bags at every stop.

No matter how we planned though, there was still plenty of lugging. Plenty of overpacking and a few full reorganization of the trunk space. But we had everything we needed and the initial packing helped a lot!

*I wrote down each day’s activities , how long we’d be in the car, what the predicted temperature change would be and what items I’d need to pack for each of us.*

My clever husband suggested I use 2.5 gallon bags to pack. Genius. For our two night stay we each had a duffel, but for all the rest I labeled a day bag to bring our necessary changes to the hotel each night. I also had a nightly snack bag packed.

My room was filling up and we didn’t have enough clothes to make it to day 10 without doing a load of laundry, so I packed a dirty clothes bag too and did laundry on the morning of Day 6 at our hotel and packed the rest of the pre-labeled bags I made with clean clothes.

*I wish this was the finished product of packing. It was not.*

This is what it looked like when we finally closed the trunk. Retrospect is 20/20 so it’s hard for me to see “now that I know” the things we packed and never needed. So for next time…

I wouldn’t pack a cooler. Yes it was nice to have mini cokes and some sparking waters and I packed vegetables and hummus and sandwich stuff, but we ate through our cooler in about 4 days, then it was taking up space. Also we had to refresh our ice all the time, and still things got waterlogged and tossed. With what I know now, I wouldn’t pack a cooler again. I also wouldn’t have packed so many snacks. We still ate fast food, gas station food, and breakfast at the hotels. Snacks we packed were melting and not desired.

Fans. We packed two little ones, but never used either. Our one place we would have used fans ended up having NO electric at all.

We also packed our suits but didn’t use them either. We never used hotel pools because we arrived late at night and showered and went to bed. Our days at the beach in Oregon we knew would be too cold for swimming.

I’d still pack in 2.5 gallon bags next time. That worked great and we used every item of clothing except the boys never wore their jeans. Only Elodie and I ended up riding horses.