Packing It In

I love to cruise. But boy, do I hate to pack.              
 

Fighting the urge to take too much. Afraid to take too little. What if it’s really hot? Or we get rain? Did we decide on a beach? Are we doing formal night? And on and on.
 
After 16 cruises, I’m sorry to report that it’s only gotten a tad easier. If you’re like me and look forward to packing as much as a root canal, you may appreciate a few tips, accumulated from many trips of taking the right—and wrong—things along:
 
List your to-dos. It works at work and it works at home. Simple but invaluable. My cruise to-do list has on it things like: book a hotel for the night before, online check-in, print up luggage tags, turn off the water, stop the newspaper and mail, tell the neighbor we’ll be gone, forward the landline to the cell.
 
Digitally document. If you do a lot of cruising like we do, it really helps to put your packing list on the computer. You can easily add and subtract over time. We print up the lists and cross off each item as it makes it into the suitcase. This just about guarantees you won’t forget anything.
 
Pack early and often. The next best way to make sure you don’t forget anything is to start early. Pull things aside that you’re taking and either load them into the suitcase or put them in a box or crate for packing later.
 
Forget cotton. Alas, I don’t follow my own advice. Warmth and cotton were made for each other. But I pay for it; I spend weeks ironing my stuff. Only to pull it out of the suitcase wrinkled as a prune. And do the whole thing again the next trip.
 
Don’t leave home without it. Some little extras we always take are top of the list—a big portable digital clock so we can see the time from everywhere in the stateroom, walkie-talkies, stainless steel coffee mugs, little reading light and water tumblers.

Stashing Your Stuff

Not as much of a torture but a challenge just the same is finding a place to put all this stuff once you get on board:
 
Do like Russian nesting dolls. When you put your suitcases under the bed, put the small one inside the big one. That frees up space under the bed.
 
Dealing with dirty wear. Once the laundry gets to a certain point, I take the small suitcase out of the big one and store the laundry in the big suitcase. That frees up closet space. All this moving around can feel like a shell game, but how else to pack it all into the little hovel they call a stateroom?
 
Closet help. We bring a shoe organizer—the kind that hangs from the bar in the closet. It provides handy storage for those small things—batteries, charging cables, sunglasses—oh, and shoes, too.
 
Have any great packing/unpacking tips of your own? Let us know!