Never a dull moment.

Packing never looks like this!

I should really have learned my lesson by now. Copying Nick doesn’t always end well. But as we all know, he is my hero and when I saw him getting all his holiday gear ready and loading it on to the spare bedroom guest hangers, I thought that was a pretty bright idea and copied.

Now in my defence, I have gone light and flimsy in the clothing department and although we can have something ridiculous like 30KGs each, we’re generally used to aiming for the 15KGs sort of weight restriction when flying.

I’m not really one for grabbing a load of clothes and just randomly packing them, it’s more a “process” which has to be “orderly”. Then when everything is in order, it gets revisited before the actual packing starts. Pre-packing went ticketty-boo with me only muttering and getting stressed about 50 times in the space of an hour. Not bad for me.

After all the pre-Christmas celebrations and the actual Christmas celebrations, we were pretty wiped out last night and opted for a chilled evening. All of a sudden there was a massive crash and both of us leapt up and ran outside. It sounded like a multi-vehicle RTC (police parlance for Road Traffic Collision). We were both a bit surprised when we were greeted with a general nothingness in our street. There was absolutely nothing going on. We’d clocked that our neighbour had been spending most of the day trying to get a gazebo erected in their garden and surmised it must have been that falling down. Oh well, drama over.

Bedtime came and off we trotted. It was at that point I learned what the massive crash had been. 16 days of holiday clothes sprawled on the floor and the guest hanger (which might normally hold clothes for folks over a weekend), in pieces on the floor too. Feathers. Spitting. Rearrange said words. 

So this morning I tackled the mess and restarted the “process” to get the shambles in some “order” and calmly started packing. We have pretty much every size suitcase somewhere in the house and had opted for large for Nick and medium for me. The packing was actually going reasonably well but I could see that although everything would go in, it’d be a squeeze. As we’re going to be living out of our suitcases for most of this trip, I realised that by the time we got to our third hotel in Sri Lanka, my suitcase would be in chaos at this rate. As luck would have it, brother Nick phoned at that very point and happily donated a large suitcase for the adventure.

So, everything out of the medium suitcase and into the borrowed large suitcase. I am here to report that there have been no further dramas on the packing front and I even have some space for purchases out there. The guest hanger will have to wait for our return to be fixed. And breathe.