Traveling Light
When we tell people we're on an Epic Road Trip, covering 10,000 miles over seven months, a common assumption is that we are traveling in an RV. It's funny to see their reactions when we say that we're driving our Z4.
Our friends already know that we are avid travelers. I learned how to travel light from years in my consulting job, and this became the norm for our whole family. When we fly, we don't check luggage except in unusual situations, like moving into a college dorm or bringing bottles of wine back from Argentina.
Our little Z4 has a surprisingly large trunk space, but we still had to carefully curate the list of items to bring with us. And this is a working trip, so we brought more tech than we would normally bring on vacation.
The gray and violet bags contain our clothing and toiletries. We each brought a pair of long pants, a pair of shorts (mine is a skort), a weeks' worth of shirts, a swimsuit, and a pair of sneakers. Steve's carry-on backpack also has our Echo, our Apple TV, and his kitchen knives. My rolling carry-on has two extra pairs of shoes, a couple of casual dresses, a comfy pair of joggers (lightweight sweatpants), extra shirts and sweaters, and a small cross-body bag. This is a pretty good indicator of our respective priorities, LOL.
We each have a small bag with our "tech": work laptops, headsets, personal laptops and tablets, and all their various chargers and cables. My bag also has a small power strip, which has been indispensable because rentals rarely have enough outlets in the right places for working.
The red and black daypacks contain clothing and toiletries for the travel legs of our journey, when we are driving for a straight week and staying in different places every 1-2 nights. When we stop for an overnight, we can bring just the daypacks and tech bags, and leave the rest of our stuff in the car.
Steve's 24" monitor folds flat. And in back on the right you can see my latest jigsaw puzzle (we pick up new ones at each destination and leave them for future guests, but sometimes I don't have time to do them) and my travel-sized memory foam pillow.
Not shown in the photo are items that stay in the car: our hiking boots, which live in the trunk when we are not hiking; our rain jackets and fleece pull-overs, which are tucked behind our seats; and miscellaneous things tucked away in various spots, including masks, sunscreen, and insect repellent. We also have my handbag, a nalgene bottle filled with water, and my favorite road trip snacks.
So even with limited cargo room, we're traveling in comfort. We may grow sick and tired of wearing the same clothes, but it feels great to be traveling this light, and still have everything we need.
