It's just about a month until our departure and I am starting to think about what we will be bringing with us. Except for the places along the way where we will be staying multiple days (Santa Fe, DelMarVa Peninsula, Gloucester, MA, and Detroit) we will be portaging every night. This will entail a lot of loading out, loading in, of our traveling gear. Since moving up to Portland, we have mastered the art of living small, but this will require shrinking even further. I am trying to suss out an efficient system for getting us in and out of the multitude of hotels we will be inhabiting. We don't travel lightly. For starters, we bring along a Brita water filter, coffee and a coffee press for JD, tea for me, our Soda Stream seltzer machine, thermoses for our tea-on-the-road as we drive, and then there is the arrival cocktail, the road snacks . . . all that before we get into the shoes and clothing.
The two other gear-heavy areas will be our communications center stuff: computers, camera, and all the attendant power supplies and paraphernalia and our toiletries. There are the various pills and things that we always travel with. I am thinking we will have two "assault" bags that we bring into the rooms, leaving the bulk of our stuff ---- the specialty clothing, bathing suits, hiking shoes, jackets, extra clothing and shoes and dirty laundry ---- back in the car. We will need some sort of crate to haul up all that coffee/tea/water apparatus. The goal would be to carry everything in one trip. As I am writing this, I am thinking . . . two trips up to the motel each time. Space shouldn't be an issue, but maybe I am being optimistic. We are going to take maybe 5 to 7 days worth of clothing and do washes along the way. Shoes are bulky and we will have to figure that out. Can't bear to wear the same pair everyday... so many shoes... so little time. As for trunk space we are going be using a rental car, not our own vehicle. JD will write about that issue. We should have enough room to hold all that, although it is easy to start sprawling in to the back seat and we want to avoid anything tempting looking being left in view.
Andrea
