Packing Up ( or How to Cram 3 Months of Everything into a Small Space)

I am a list maker.  I love making lists. And lists of lists. So for me an early part of planning a trip is pulling out paper & pencil and thinking of what to take along, menus, things to do before we leave. It takes considerable self restraint to not start making piles of the items that appear on those lists many weeks in advance. I did well this year: I only started piling things up today, 3 days before departure.  But now there piles everywhere! Literally every room has a mound of things that will be schlepped to the boat very soon.

This is what 3 months of my clothing looks like when packing for several different climate conditions.

Luckily the hot weather gear is mostly what I'll be needing, and it packs down pretty small using my little zippered bags.  We need to be prepared for heat, wind, rain, cool days, swimming days, sunburned days. We might be in Maine for the start of their cold autumn weather, so we are going prepared for that, too.

Then there's food. As anyone who's spent 10 minutes talking to us knows, Brent & I like to cook in a 'go big or go home' style. We don't do convenience foods, everything is from scratch. We do not skimp on bringing along our favorite ingredients.  That's just our thing.

I've been creating lists of menus for about three months now, followed by lists of ingredients to make them.  There's calendar grids with proposed meals. We have a 3-ring notebook with boat-friendly recipes scaled down to 2 servings. And of course my spiral notebook full of...what else?....Lists.

Along the way there will be stops at places with grocery stores near the water where we will buy fresh & perishable items or things we run out of. The catch is we have to walk there & back, carrying our purchases and leading our elderly dog who doesn't walk too fast any more (more about that later). In order to minimize the weight we have to lug back to the boat, we will buy heavy & bulky things before we leave: canned goods, dog food, paper goods, etc. Pre-trip buying also lets us re-package as necessary in the comfort of our home kitchen.

There are certain rules about how to pack food for cruising on a boat that I've learned from experienced cruiser friends.
1) Don't bring anything in glass. It's heavy and it breaks.
2) Remove all cardboard & paper packaging. Bugs like to hide in the boxes, and we sure don't want uninvited passengers!
3) Use a Sharpee to label the contents of every can. Humidity tends to dissolve the glue holding paper labels on the metal can and the labels fall off.  Without marking on them, you'd soon be playing "let's guess what's in this can....." Dinner could become a real surprise!
4)The home kitchen needs some prepping, too. Try to empty the pantry so things left behind don't go stale. And the frig & freezer should also be left empty in case there's one of our frequent and lengthy home power outages.

There's one more trip to town to do for rolls of quarters from the bank for laundromats, a visit to the local chicken farmer for 5 dozen fresh, unwashed eggs that don't need to be refrigerated,  a fill of the propane tank that runs the stove & hot water heater, return library books and one last grocery run for perishable items. I've worked my last shift before departure at the library & medical clinic. Now I'm left with that jittery anxiety I associate with driving to the airport to catch a flight: subtle worries about everything and nothing in particular. I know things will be ok since I've taken that flight 100 times before, but the adrenaline still flows. For the next couple days I need a combination of staying busy & taking naps!

The weather has turned brutally hot, but should ease up on Monday & that looks like our target departure day.  It's starting to get real!