Sometimes, the packing is the real expedition. Forget the trip. The trip isn’t the issue. The trip isn’t even the adventure. In fact, the trip is the vacation you need just because of all the packing and the planning and the getting it to fit in the car.
Especially in a pandemic. When, after several months of social distancing in your house – venturing out only to buy groceries and see if the sky is still blue – you decide to take the family away from home. To a rented house in the North Carolina mountains. Easy to get to. You can take everything you need. You know the area. And you can spend all your time socially-distanced on trails and out-of-the-way places where hopefully no coronavirus will show its face … because of bears.
But … sometimes, the packing is the real expedition. Sometimes, getting ready is so exhausting that you need an extra day just to recover from it all. Before you can go out and try to enjoy yourself. You need that time to recover from the planning. The loading. The fear that it would burst your car at the seams. Carrying it all in.
All so you can do it again a few days later … after you’ve used maybe 2 percent of everything you brought.
But I’m a planner. A worrier. A planning worrier. I’m so obsessive-compulsive that I keep detailed lists in order to manage my proliferation of detailed lists. That was certainly the case for this short, four-night trip designed to limit grocery store jaunts or anything that would take us out of the comfortable wilds and into the unknowns of civilization.
To achieve this feat was relatively easy. All I had to do was pack our entire house, plus our dog, into the back of our Toyota RAV4.
Easy!
My lists were extensive. They called for every flashlight I own, and I own a lot. Small ones and big ones. LED lamps and ones that shoot bright spotlights in case I ever need to chase down escaped prisoners. They called for first aid kits and full dinners and big coolers and libraries worth of books. They called for enough beer to open a brew pub. Enough backup battery chargers to power a mid-size city. Enough germ-killing cleaning supplies to sanitize a large-size city. Oh, and some fancy crackers with Manchego cheese. (Very important in a pandemic!)
And it will all fit! Of course, it will. Forget that my ideas are bigger than the squishy thing I keep cradled in my skull. Or that I’m like a kid at Christmas who wants it all, but has no concept of how he will find time to use it … or even fit the haul somewhere.
The day of the big trip, I carried it all out to the driveway at 5 in the morning and laid it out. It stretched 500 yards into the street. I had with me a color-coded map – like a madman’s puzzle filled with odd shapes and squiggle lines. This depicted how I thought it would all fit in the car.
When I drew the map, I must have been drinking, or hallucinating. Because what I came to find out was that the map in no way resembled the shape, layout, or most importantly, the size of my actual vehicle. Upon further review, the storage area I drew appeared to be the cavernous cargo hold of an early-19th century Transatlantic steamer, not the confined and limited cubby-hole of a standard mid-size vehicle.
“How the heck am I going to make this fit?!?” I muttered to myself, a little panicked and certain there was nothing I could leave behind.
This is usually the point that my wife walks out. Her jaw dropped open and she said something very profound and enlightening like, “It’s not going to fit!”
I smirked, burying my panic, and said something nonchalant like, “Of course, it is. See? I have a map!”
Her eyes danced from the map to the back of the car to my piles of stuff. “Yep,” she said. “What you drew there is the cargo hold of an early-19th century Transatlantic steamer. This, on the other hand, will never work.”
“No!” I told her, no longer so sure of myself. “I used factory-based specs. The map is color-coded. It’ll fit!”
I still don’t know how I did it. I still don’t know how it didn’t split the car in half as we drove down the interstate. And I certainly haven’t recovered yet from my planning expedition. But what I know is I’m now in desperate need of a vacation to nurse back my sanity. Guess I better start planning that one.