Early Trip Anxiety

Oct 20, 2010First Blog Report

Don’t be surprised by pictures of luggage, backpacks, and plastic bags.  Who among us,  that has travelled, hasn’t faced the excruciating exercise of stuffing everything you absolutely must have for a successful trip into bags that only provide space for about one half of what you absolutely must have.

Colleen & I think ourselves to be well organized.  Luggage on the one hand and our remembrance of trips past combined with our sense of organization on the other hand leads to the story in this first blog.

There seems to be difficulty uploading pictures as the site was closed for uploading earlier.  Since this is a test , Ill just go on.

As you can see from the first couple of pictures we gathered together just about every piece of luggage, backpack, and plastic travel bags that we owned or borrowed.  Our selection of luggage was, in some measure, based on our bus/ship trip to Scotland in 2007.

We took advantage of Cunard’s program to pre-ship big luggage directly to the ship tied up at the port we were boarding.  And it worked fine.  When we got to the ship the luggage we shipped about 4 weeks earlier was in our cabin waiting for us.  What’s not to like, we’ll do the same thing on this trip, and that’s where our troubles started.

We assumed that we took our smaller roll away bags on the bus part of our trip because of size limitations in the tour material.  And then sent 1 or 2 larger bags, we couldn’t remember which, to the ship.  Because this ship cruise is twice as long as the previous one, we thought shipping 2 bags were in order.

As we began to pack we became distressed because there was no way we could get all of what we needed into the bags we had selected.  In addition, much of what we needed was on the bus part with the small bags not the ship part with the big bags.   This led to serious discussions about ,“ Why are we doing this?  This is work, stress and no fun.”

Later, we bit the bullet, cut our ships luggage to one bag, in this last picture, and decided we would go through with the trip even though there would be more personal discomfort than we bargained for.  We were not happy campers!

While doing a last check on the bag destined to go to Venice and our cabin, I started to zip up an outside pocket that we had not used.  Much to my surprise I discovered a receipt from the hotel we stayed at in Glasgow.  I then realized that we must have not taken the small bags to Scotland, but the larger ones.  Colleen subsequently checked the current limitations and found that our larger luggage was acceptable.   What joy!  We will not have to wear the same shirt for four days, wash out our socks every night, etc.

We are now looking forward to a very pleasant bus trip through central Italy.

Tom & Colleen.