Packing philosophies

There are various methodologies employed when packing. I normally sway towards the theory that everything should be left until roughly the last thirty minutes before I go, and then hoping that the sheer panic that sets in when I realise I haven’t packed will carry me through to victory. Admittedly this can sometimes backfire horribly, when I land somewhere toting only one Hawaiian shirt and seventeen pairs of underpants, but most of the time it is a spot on philosophy. Spending too much time thinking about the packing just results in disaster, in my case anyway, I just end up with loads of stuff that I really didn’t need or want. On one trip, I ended up re-packing my bag two days after arrival into two bags, one which contained the things I actually needed, and the other which I didn’t open again for the next five weeks.

I haven’t, therefore, packed as yet for my trip to the UK tomorrow. I will probably leave it until tomorrow morning, at around six am, which is around half an hour before we have to leave. My dear girlfriend, on the other hand, appears to be opting for the “panic over the clothing to take the night before” option. And not wishing to stereotype, but girls do seem to have it harder when it comes to selecting outfits for travelling. I can hardly blame her. I have informed her that England is likely to be cold, that we will be attending an outdoor party at a giant treehouse, and we will spend a number of days tramping over Welsh mountains, as well as some other days wandering around the Oxfordshire countryside and associated pubs. Who could know what to pack in such a scenario? Luckily my entire life has been compressed down into a rucksack already, so it’s not so much a question of choice, more a question of what is clean when I randomly select it and stuff it haphazardly into my Easyjet approved hand luggage sized day pack.

Anyway. The point of this post is that I am off to the UK on a little excursion tomorrow. The first half of this trip will be meeting up with some absolutely wonderful friends who live in Oxford, who are kindly accommodating me, where we will spend some time wandering around Oxford (one of my favourite UK cities) and I expect, visiting pubs. We’ll also be having a large party at a treehouse. This is a fairly hard venue to explain, and will probably be the subject of it’s own blog post at some point.

The second half of the trip will be visiting my parents in Wales, and wandering around the mountainsides of Snowdonia, which is a spectacularly beautiful part of the world. I really can’t wait. I will, of course, be blogging about the whole thing on the way and with any luck, the trip won’t be quite so alcohol based as my previous trip to the UK, where from what I can hazily recall, I largely stumbled from pub to pub with my brother and various friends, presumably in some sort of misguided effort to set some kind of world record for pub visits in six days. Which we no doubt failed to achieve.

One final thing. A friend of mine has recently started her own blog, and as she is about to embark on a year long trip to Australia, it will probably be worth checking out. Her name is Katie, and her blog can be found here. Enjoy!