Traveling Light

I have always loved travelling. It’s the packing I hate. What to take, what to leave behind? Will it be hot or cold, dry or rainy? Packing when I was single was bad enough, but when I had my first child it was horrific.

Looking back on my first trip abroad to Spain with my six month old daughter, I think I may possibly have been a little insane. (Okay, a lot.) Unable to persuade me that it really wasn’t sensible to pack everything but the kitchen sink, my husband had given up in a huff and gone to mow the garden, while I ran around the house like a mad thing, throwing one item after another into the five huge suitcases we were taking for a two week holiday. Yes, five cases! And the fifth bag, infamously known as ‘The Black Hole’, was massive. Not really a suitcase, more an extra-over-sized hold-all.

And ‘hold-all’ it did! Inside were Emma’s enormous, bulky baby walker on wheels (because of those hard marble floors), her heavy Silver Cross car seat (because, obviously, Spanish baby seats were simply not up to British safety standards), a giant, bright red, plastic airplane that attached to a door frame with a huge spring (didn’t want her getting bored now, did we) and too many other items to name. I just kept chucking it in. Madness! What on earth was I thinking? Well, obviously I wasn’t thinking. I was simply allowing my hormones to run amok.

The Black Hole was so mammoth that were forced to wheel it over to The Excess Baggage counter at the airport, which really should have been called The What The Hell Are You Doing Packing Such An Enormous Bag counter, much to my husband’s mortification. The ground crew assistant was about to charge us an exorbitant excess baggage fee, but took one look at my husband’s thunderously angry face and the desperation on mine, and relented, bless him, saying he would push it through without charging us.

It was even worse the other end. Still fuming, my husband had to pile all the luggage precariously onto one tiny and rather rickety Spanish trolley, while I waltzed along beside him daintily pushing our daughter in her stroller. Finally arriving at the car rental, stressed out and sweating profusely by now, we then had to somehow fit everything into the teeny-weeny Fiat Panda rental car we had hired, “because there are only three of us, after all.”

Although we used all the ridiculous items I had brought along, they were completely unnecessary as my daughter was more than happy to sit outside under an umbrella playing with a pile of sand and a wooden spoon all day. A week later we were joined by some friends, who still talk about the astounding amount of luggage I packed for a two week holiday and refused to ever travel with us again, after witnessing the whole awful process in reverse when we left.