I've taken two trips outside the Bay Area and realized we've all gotten hilariously bad at packing

But both times I made ridiculous mistakes: bringing multiple bottles of facial sunscreen but no face wash or moisturizer on a trip to the desert, for example, or packing multiple pairs of socks when none of my shoes required them, or bringing multiple pairs of sandals when one would have been plenty. Clearly, I’m out of practice. 

When I asked friends and colleagues if they also felt oddly overwhelmed by the prospect of packing, the consensus was yes, we’ve all gotten very incompetent at leaving our homes. 

There are two distinct, but related, schools of travel packing screw-up. 

The first is the most clear-cut: after being at home with all of our belongings for such a protracted period, it’s easy to forget things we use regularly. Things like tweezers, a laptop charger, or the medication you keep next to the coffeemaker so you remember to take it each morning. These are the obvious things — and their obviousness makes us take them for granted. 

If you’re going on a beach vacation, you’re probably not going to forget your swimsuit, flip flops and sunscreen. That’s because, as you fill your bag with sundresses and Hawaiian shirts like some kind of extra in a Gidget movie, you’re fantasizing about your toes in the sand, the sun on your face. You’re not imagining yourself in the horribly lit hotel bathroom, flossing your teeth and popping your nightly medication. You’re not picturing the moment when you want to listen to music on your phone by the pool, but don’t have headphones. Or, for that matter, the moment you have to run to the closest big box store to pick up the things you forgot and realize that place is air conditioned to near-arctic temperatures and you didn’t bring a single article of warm clothing. 

The routine, day-to-day items that are just there — next to the bathroom sink, tucked into your office drawer, in your hall closet — are unsexy and wildly forgettable. 

The opposite problem, I’ve found, is more amusing: on my very quick recent trip to Mexico, I managed to bring four pairs of shoes. One pair per day. Three of those pairs were sandals, one were slip-on leather flats, none were walking shoes. What else did I bring a bunch of? Socks. Because nothing screams vacation like wearing socks with your sandals. I credit this kind of overpacking, and just generally wacky packing, to frantically throwing things in my bag at the last minute. After 15 months of enduring the fear and trauma of living through a pandemic, a moment of pre-travel panic seems fairly natural. It also makes for terrible packing decisions — if not similarly disastrous life choices. Learn from me, so you won’t be me. 

Check the weather where you’re going

This seems as basic as advice comes, but after being in the same place for over a year, watching weather change with our temperate seasons, the usual shifts from our drizzly Bay Area winters to windy spring and warm, dry summers, I’d all but forgotten how extreme weather can be elsewhere. It snowed in Tahoe two weeks ago. At the same time, it was nearly 100 degrees in Baja. There are summer thunderstorms with drenching rainfall in the northeast.

And, yes, even when your destination is blazingly, record-breakingly hot, you’ll likely still need at least one lightweight, packable jacket, overshirt or sweater for those air conditioned places that are inexplicably 62 degrees when it’s sweltering outside.

Bring the right bag

For years, I swore by a soft sided two-wheeled Eagle Creek (RIP) carry-on, but in the last couple years have become a four-wheeled hardshell Delsey enthusiast. I prefer the latter because the four wheels really do make it much easier to speed through an airport without feeling it the next day. And, folks, the airports are packed, security is slow, and everyone's a little on edge. Give yourself plenty of time to make it through the airport. 

But the biggest benefit of a hard bodied bag, for me, is the fact that they make it virtually impossible to overpack and end up with a bag that won’t be allowed onboard as a carry-on. With my soft-sided bag, I’d often find myself shoving items into the external pockets and filling the bag until it was bursting at the seams. A suitcase simply doesn’t allow for that nonsense. They also protect their contents and nothing sours an arrival like a squashed bottle of shampoo or, worse, a broken bottle of mezcal. 

But whatever your bag of choice, choose wisely. It’s a gnarly travel world out there right now and lugging an overstuffed duffle along on the ride is setting yourself up for failure.

Don’t wait to pack until the night before

In a perfect world, my suitcase is out and mostly packed three days before a trip. That way, when my mind flashes to something I might forget, I can easily add it right then and there. Similarly, this strategy helps me resist my impulse to overpack. Each time I walk past that bag overflowing with more wardrobe changes than a beauty pageant, I’m reminded of who I am, how I travel, and what I’ll actually need. Which is to say, I am not Imelda Marcos and I do not need multiple pairs of shoes for a four-day trip. 

What I do need, it’s clear, is to leave my home more. I need to get out often enough that my atrophied travel muscles slowly regain their pre-pandemic strength and I can once again be trusted to catch a flight without leaving necessities — and possibly my mind — behind.