MacGougan at Large

Notes on A Trip to Norway - 1

Packing for the Trip

My wife and I aspire to be the kind of people who can travel internationally using only carry-on bags. You know the people I’m talking about. Confident travelers who know just what to bring and can therefore travel light. They breeze past Baggage Claim, don’t struggle to schlep big bags, and never need to dig very far into their things to find just what they’re looking for. These are the people we simultaneously admire and resent.

Sadly, we have not yet arrived at such a state. In our defense, this trip would have been a challenge for even the most experienced travelers to accomplish on a carry-on-only basis. A two-week trip to Norway - with one week devoted to hiking in the cool and regularly rain-swept Lofoten Islands and another week traveling and meeting relatives in the warmer and more reliably sunny southern Norway. 

Hiking boots alone take up half a bag. I daydream about saving space by wearing them on the plane, but to date lack the chutzpah to clomp through an airport in hiking boots.

When we need to pack for a trip, our technique is to start well ahead of time and set aside a staging area - in our case a guest bedroom. We fill it with “candidates” - everything that would be nice to have along with us on the trip if volume of baggage were no object.

I think of this as the Michelangelo Method of packing. The roomful of candidates is essentially a block of marble. It’s our job to chip away everything that isn’t an angel.

The downside of this method is that we stop paring down our piles once we’ve gotten things to the point where - with the judicious use of compression bags and little tricks like stuffing underwear into the insides of packed shoes - we can just barely fit everything into our bags. This is still too much stuff to bring, particularly when the trip involves lots of moving around. 

One key giveaway that you’ve packed too much is when it takes two of you to get a bag fully closed and secured. Another giveaway is when individual packed items are pushing so hard against the inside of the bag that they can be clearly identified from the outside of the bag.  

The big advantage of the Michelangelo Method for me is that it gives me an excuse to get a wardrobe consultation before it’s too late. My usual way to request a wardrobe consultation is to show up at breakfast. If no comment is made about my attire, then I’m good to go. If Linda says, “Is that what you’re wearing today?” then it’s back to the drawing board.

Imagine this scenario: It’s our first morning in Norway. Linda got up early and went down to the breakfast buffet. I come down to join her, and she says, “Is that what you’re wearing today?” 

Under those circumstances, there’s not much of a drawing board for me to go back to. Not only is that what I’m wearing today, it’s what I’m wearing every second day for the next two weeks. At that point, my last hope would be that maybe Norway, like the kindergarten class my granddaughter recently graduated from, has random “Let’s All Wear Our Pajamas” days.