Packing and Planning

The dining room is crammed with piles of stuff- not the usual piles of stuff like games, books, and large scale craft projects that pretty much always invade our dining room, but stuff for our adventure in the desert.What exactly does one take for 5 weeks in the desert? We are planning on taking a whole lotta stuff, and beginning to worry about where the passengers are going to fit on this little journey. It turns out that some of our packings are actually a lot like our usual clutter- books and games, but only small scale craft projects to go, and now it's all packed semi-neatly in baskets and bags in the corner and ready to go instead of just random stacks on any available flat surface.
I am noticing that an inordinately large amount of space is going towards food. We're big fans of food around here and we enjoy snacking so much that we tend to travel everywhere we go with fairly large quantities of edible items. It just makes everyone happy to have handy nibbles that don't require stopping and going in a restaurant or worse, relying on gas station mini mart fodder. So, half the car is full of food.

Next came the books. Who knows if my visions of sitting peacefully on a rock and reading while the sun sets will actually happen, but I like to be prepared. First, I ordered myself a few books that look like good reflective reading including
The Art of Non-Conformity, Wishcraft, and another one on creating work that you love, the name of which isn't coming to me, and is currently buried under mountains of stuff. My local library didn't have any of these, and besides I figured the late fines I could accrue by taking library books on this journey would be embarrassing and costly. Then, I learned that my library offers extended vacation loans! Is that amazing or what? Yes, we can borrow books for the whole time we'll be gone, and we won't even get in trouble, well, unless we drop them in a campfire or off the edge of the Grand Canyon or something. So, I borrowed some audio books since I can't drive and read at the same time, and Boy Child got a few books to read as well- including a fictional journal about a boy in the Donner Party. Not the cheeriest travel story I'm sure, but on the bright side, we have all that food, thereby reducing the chances we will have to eat each other if we get stuck anywhere, and in general, any mishaps we encounter will probably not look so bad in light of their sad story.

Girl Child has an elaborate system of lists, maps and plans spread across 3 rooms, and I am gently nudging that we have enough lists, now we just need to get the stuff packed and loaded. Boy Child swears he already has everything packed he needs. We'll see about that. He also had it in his mind that we would leave before 8 am, but I reminded him that this is supposed to be a relaxing vacation, and alarms and rushing off in the early morning may not be the best way to start that.

So, it's pouring rain, and the wind is blowing like crazy, neither of which is helping my car loading attempts, and we're still trying to figure out how exactly we're going to make all of this stuff fit. One way or another, we'll cram it all in (or on) the car though and will be hitting the road, and hopefully sunnier skies. Off we go....