Practice Packing Our Bags

We now have 14 days to go until we depart from London Heathrow and as you can imagine those 14 days are pretty booked up with leaving parties, doctors appointments and panic attacks.

However, even with all that I deiced we needed to fit in a practice pack for a few reasons:

1) It's an excellent way to double check you have everything
We set aside a whole morning to do our practice pack and it didn't take long for it to become very clear that we had nowhere near all the stuff we needed. 

Whatever, we'd carry on anyway and start making a list on the side of all the bits we still had to get; that way we'd know how much space to allow ourselves in our backpacks for things we were yet to get.

However, this list soon got so large we had to abandon our practice pack and instead, spend 5 hours in Guildford buying everything from eye masks to padlocks.

2) I'm a control freak
Yep. I'll admit it, I really don't like the unknown and just being able to cross off knowing how big and heavy my bag is going to be from my list of stresses makes me a very happy boy.

3) Emma and I have very different ideas about what needs to be packed 
I'm very much a t-shirt and shorts will do kind of guy. Emma meanwhile wasn't sure how many, and I quote, "glamorous dresses" to take and persisted into bullying me into taking a shirt and a posh pair of shoes.

I DON'T EVEN WEAR POSH SHOES AT HOME!

To be fair to her though we do need some posh clothes so that we can go to this bar in Singapore.

But I did hope the practice pack would give me a chance to try and cut the weak from the chaff in Emma's Asia wardrobe.

Unfortunately, I failed miserably.

Firstly we decided to get all the clothes we wanted to take out and onto the bed to see what kind of a task we would be facing.

Emma and I went for two different strategies, personally, I decided to group my clothes by area of the body and separate them evenly.

Emma decided to go for the 'I am clearing out my wardrobe and this is what can go to the charity shop look'.

Callum = Left                                                            Emma = Right

We both had agreed that as we are going on such a long trip that there would be no point having a 'your stuff in your bag and my stuff in my bag' rule. Then I remembered that Emma is a sickly child who needs to take 6 months worth of inhalers and 6 months worth of contact lenses and I instantly realised why we'd agreed to split stuff.

Whilst stuffing my bag it dawned on me that I had vastly underestimated the size of my bag and with all my clothes, wash bag and first aid kit packed I still had around one third of an empty bag.

I now no longer have that; what I do have however is 6 months worth of inhalers and 80 millions pairs of contact lenses that are all waiting to explode in my bag.

Small gripes aside though it really wasn't too bad, we both now can take all we wanted without fear of never being able to get all the stuff back in the bags again and we even took them for a test run, 45 minutes of walking over uneven and sandy ground and nothing went wrong, which is a nice change for us.

So now all we need to do is wait these last 14 days, tick off the 5 or so things still on our to-do list and THEN it will be time to take these bags out into the big wide world.