By far the most challenging aspect of being travel ready! Everything else was relatively easy to do in terms of procedure:
• Sell car
• Rent condo out
• Pack / Sell / Throw stuff
• Quit jobs
• Visit family
• Find a new gig for the helper
• Stop childcare
Easy, easy, easy. Use our Travel Readiness Checklist when planning for your trip to consider all the nitty-gritty aspects of ensuring all aspects on the home-front and the travel front is considered and catered for!
Back to packing though, what to pack for a family of 4 for an entire year on the road? Tough business! After multiple rounds of packing and repacking, this is what we ended with as the core luggage pack.
We adopted 2 key principles:
• Packing for a week for each of us in terms of clothing
• Layering up for cold weather
Turns out we really didn’t need that much. What we ended up with should have made us proud but we are continually astounded by how much more we have than we want so we continuously shed stuff as we go along. It’s a good thing we’ve been on a journey of minimalism for a while now. It made the idea of packing light a lot easier to adapt to.
We realize and enjoy the philosophy of freedom while travelling is about travelling light. It reduces the weight you have to carry and when bits and these pieces add up then you end up having an extra bag! If you have to pay for that extra bag on 1 flight or all the flights you take and it’s filled with stuff you can buy locally where you travel, then you probably have wasted a tonne of cash!
3 months in to our travels and we are certain this is a rock solid packing list that you can most certainly use as a base for your travel packing.
A couple of sound assumptions here:
1. When you travel with a full service airline, you will be able to get ear plugs and eye shades if you ask. If you are flying with budget airlines, you best pack this in your carry-on.
2. Everything else, you can buy when you are in your location of choice. Examples:
– diapers! (there are kids everywhere in the world!)
– wet wipes
– shampoo / soap / conditioner / baby toiletries
– laundry detergent
– lip balm
– sanitary napkins (although I highly recommend the use of menstrual cups!)
– paper for the kids to draw / write / colour on
In fact when I had to return to Malaysia unexpectedly for my dad’s surgery, leaving Mr.C alone with the kids, I packed almost 95% of my stuff back with me so that Mr.C would be able to move around with less luggage.
This was not the usual sized backpack you see back papers carry. This was a regular backpack but it had everything of mine in it except my raincoat and my laptop.
I stepped into uncharted territory on my 38 hour journey back to Peru when I found out I could check my backpack in all the way to Bogota.
Cool beans! Checked in the backpack in which left me with just the below picture to carry on my entire flight from Penang to Singapore, Singapore to London and London to Bogota.
I felt oddly light. As I said, uncharted territory. It had everything I needed though.
• Passport
• Immunization card
• Earphones
• Charger cable
• Lip balm
• Hairband
• Eye drops
• Pen
Travelling light has been liberating! You can adopt travelling this way too, if you would like. There’s no looking back though, once you experience it you’ll never be the same!
Our downloadable and editable file is available to you for free via the link below or our Travel Resources page!
