Road Trip Organization

When we were planning a family vacation to OBX this summer, we jokingly compared pack lists to sort of check everyone's progress and to, admittedly, express some dismay over what is involved when transporting a family for an entire week. And! The younger those people are the more involved and lengthy the lists become.

As an aside, our first trip as a family was for a work trip I had at the beach for a client's convention. The event was VERY family friendly/oriented. Skip had attended a few times previously, and there was no question at all that our eight month old twin girls were expected to be splashing around in the pool in between meetings and events. (Needless to say, this was a wonderful perk of an even more wonderful client.)

Any rate. We definitely looked forward to this trip, but we also knew that first year with the girls would be much more challenging than past years. My pack list was in notebook form and took up about six pages. We jokingly wondered if we should rend a U-haul to transport everything - and I do mean everything. We survived, and we got better at it. I'm so glad we stuck with it because going to the beach with the trio has been one of our favorite things ever.

For comparison, below is an image of our car while traveling to Williamsburg and Outer Banks in 2009.  So this is a minivan, with the back row removed, and packing starts just behind the second row of seating and extends to the gate. The blankets in the bottom right? That's a changing station. Although it was no longer really needed for this trip, this was our basic set up for a couple of years, and we kept it up for any roadside situations, e.g., first aid, car sickness, etc.

2009

Also, not to leave George out, while we had packing down to a science by the time he was born, he threw us a curve ball because he would only sleep in his swing. Since he was suffering from horrible allergies (and itchy all the time), we let him! Doing so was such a small thing to try to keep him comfortable. We packed everything, but we had to have room for the swing. The SWING! We mentioned our dilemma and Skip's dad successfully got the thing folded, which was the only way it would go in the car, but it still took up some serious real estate.

That was a big packing tangent, yes?

So anyway... the packing list I use most frequently is a free printable form from MomAgenda. Since we are way out of the baby stage, I've thought about personalizing a pack list, but I ran across this updated one this week from IHeartOrganizing. I'm still leaning toward a personalized list, but these are two great options.

Although we relax our eating habits on vacation (Our kids probably burn 5,000 calories a day on vacation, and we figure they can use all the fuel they can get.), I LOVE this packing system for food/snacks during road trips. We really don't like to eat fast food when traveling, but transporting food - and especially keeping it cold - is challenging. I mean, sure, we have a bag of snacks and some fruit, but this:

Image by IHeartOrganizing

Image by IHeartOrganizing

is pro-level.  This is aspirational snack- and meal-packing.

We keep hoping to have fewer things to transport, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Therefore, getting the system fully organized is very appealing.