When it comes to keeping a house clean and organized, well, I stink at it. Right now our house looks like it was hit by a natural disaster. I really do try but it’s generally to no avail. I figure some day I will resolve myself to the fact that achieving magazine photo worthy rooms is just not in the cards. But that’s not the point of this post. When it comes to packing for travel, I don’t want to brag but I’m pretty good at it.

The Checklist

Packing for a trip across the country in a car? I am a little apprehensive. So I start where I always start. With my checklist. Always handwritten on lined paper complete with hand drawn checkboxes. I can’t travel without a checklist. I would forget too many things. Important things. I generally have a heading for each person and each type of bag they’ll have with them. Then there’s a heading for generic topics like snacks or toiletries. I’ll even have a category specific to the mode of travel. For example if we are flying I will have the “plane” category. This means everything in that category is something I’ll need to have accessible on the plane.

The checklist for Route 66 is large. I’ve included just one page of the list to give you a visual of how I work . Admittedly, I’m not sure everything on the list is going to fit in the car despite having rented a larger vehicle for this trip. I think the list is going to come down to this question: “do we really need it or do we just want it for convenience?”. This means the list must be prioritized with the must haves at the top of the list. Of course, most of Ben’s items will take a higher priority over anything else. As long as he’s happy, we’ll all be happy.

The Staging Room

From the checklist grows the “staging room”. If you don’t have the luxury of an empty spare bedroom lying around your house, you should at least designate an area where you can put things you’re not currently using but are planning to bring. At the very least when someone says to me, “don’t forget to bring…” I can reply with, “put it in the staging room”. Of course I’ll still have to add it to the checklist but the room helps me get organized well in advance of a trip. And it offers a great visual of how I may want to create and organize sections in the car.

As you can see from the photo, there’s a lot of stuff already staged for the trip which does beg the question “if you’re not using it right now then why do you need it on the trip”? I’ll use my best mom response here. Because I said so? Hence the need to prioritize.

The Daily Bins

While you may not know it, the staging room photo also shows that I’m trying out some new things. I am completely against lugging a very large suitcase to and from the hotel each night. Knowing myself like I do, the contents of that very neatly packed suitcase will look like a dirty clothes hamper within two days on the road and I won’t be able to function.

So I am trying out a daily bin idea. Originally I thought packing cubes might be the way to go. I use them in my suitcases. They work well there. But packing cubes are expensive. They would be prone to sliding around the back of the car if not contained and after exhaustive searching I couldn’t find any with the exact dimensions I wanted.

What I did find are pop up fabric bins for a fraction of the cube cost. Especially when you’re willing to buy the style that no one else seems to want. They have a little window to see what’s inside. They easily stack and the fabric provides a little friction to stop sliding and we can fit one day’s worth of clothes for all three of us.

I have grand plans to lay out the outfits for each bin and take pictures that can be set into the window for easy identification. This would allow a little flexibility to “choose” what you want to wear the next day. Ben is very insistent these days on choosing his clothes so it could go a long way towards peace in the kingdom. With less than a month left I’m not sure that’s going to be a reality. But I’m sure going to try.

In any case, at the end of a long day, we unpack only the things we need in the hotel and place them in our handy fold up wagon cart: the backpacks, the daily bin, the toiletries bag, the everyday bag (which contains pajamas, swim suits, etc.) and of course the single cup coffee brewer.

Bring Your Own Coffee

We are very serious about the need for for decent coffee each day. There’s nothing worse than hotel room coffee. Well maybe hotel lobby coffee. We have a number of early morning days planned and coffee is very important to us. More than that, we want to feel like we’re enjoying our morning coffee on the front porch with the birds softly singing their morning song as we slowly sip that slow roasted goodness. Oh wait, I got carried away there. Sorry.

Coffee. Good.

Which brings us back to the single cup brewer. Having our own brewer gives us reliably good coffee and the ability to store our brew so we can enjoy multiple cups as we roll down the road. This sounds perfect, right? Well…now the bad news…we have a big caveat on the brewer. We decided to test out our single cup brewer on the Lincoln Highway warmup trip…and it didn’t work. We thought maybe the brewer was already broken…which would be our luck, but it wasn’t that simple. Turns out that it was a power issue. Despite the hotel having a single cup brewer (albeit a different brand) and using the same outlet, it couldn’t support power needed by the heating element in our brewer. Disappointing but we have plans to use the outlet devoted to the microwave in our next room. Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. But won’t be surprised if it doesn’t – it will be a nightly mystery.

The Three Ring Binder of Joy

My other favorite new idea to try out is the three ring binder of joy. I can’t say I came up with this idea on my own. I spent some time searching the web for packing ideas, packing ideas with kids, organizing the car for road trips, etc. you name it, I’ve searched it.

There are tons of ideas for do-it-yourself first aid kits, organizing your car and don’t leave out a gazillion pictures on Pinterest regarding road trip organizing ideas. So after browsing 30 or 40 sites and those gazillion images I started thinking about what I could do with a binder and three ring pencil cases. The binder of joy was born. It currently has five pencil cases separated into categories:

• Cleaning: lens wipes for glasses/wet wipes for hands
• Emergency Meds: ibuprofen, acetaminophen, naproxen, and antacid in convenient single dose packs, and kids anti-nausea chewable
• Toiletries: dental floss, tweezers, nail clippers, tiny scissors, band aids, ointment
• Quick post: postcard stamps, a pen and addresses for friends and family
• National Park passports and annual membership card, roadside assistance membership card

In the binder pockets, an accessible list of hotels, their addresses and confirmation numbers. It’s super easy to access from the front seat of the car and easily carried into the hotel each night.

All in all we have a long way to go before we are ready but I feel like we are off to a good start. Stay tuned for some “Snack Talk” because it’s all about the choices.

traveling with kids