tetris
I learned an unexpected packing lesson last month.
As a big fan of packing cubes, I have amassed a collection of different shapes and sizes so that I have what I need. However, I rarely use the medium cubes and never the large ones; preferring instead to use small ones. My thinking has always been that smaller shapes will fit better and offer more flexibility.
Even though geometry was not one of my strong subjects in school — okay, all of my math classes were my lowest grades across middle and high school — I have great spatial awareness and I am very good at Tetris. This applies to both the game and packing projects. For example, I will toot my own horn here and brag that I am excellent at packing a car to move a college student to their dorm and back home again. Ditto packing for a road trip.
For our recent 5-week trip around Europe, I thought long and hard about what I would be packing and edited the list down to what I thought were the essentials. (Turns out, I could have packed even less, but that’s another post.)
When the time came to put those clothes into packing cubes, I went with my usual configuration of three:
That’s two small narrow rectangular cubes, one smaller rectangle, 1 shoe bag, and my folded raincoat. Yet, for some reason, these did not fit well in my backpack, even though I tested a similar configuration earlier this year.
I decided to change to two packing cubes:
Okay, this photo is mid-packing and things are a bit of a mess, but the important information is that I kept the small blue cube and replaced the narrow ones with a larger blue one that was actually smaller than the sum of the two narrow ones. So, less cube space overall. Somehow, everything fit. The larger one had dresses, leggings, and other layers; the small one had undergarments, scarves, and socks.
Going down to two cubes fit better and, as it turned out, helped me stay better organized throughout the trip. Maybe because I had fewer packing cubes, even if it was only one less?
With that in mind, I’m going to rethink how I pack all my other things: toiletries, sewing kit, cords and chargers, and all those other miscellaneous things I take. I always organize stuff into a variety of little zippered pouches, usually ending up with 6-8. And then every time I load my backpack, I’m thinking about where things would best fit. Perhaps fewer pouches would make more sense???
I know this is nothing earth-shattering, but my point here is that it’s good to test one’s perceptions and try something new to see if it will work.
Tell me about your experiences with packing cubes. And how do you corral and organize all your miscellaneous stuff?
My packing cubes haven’t traveled much lately, since we’d been tied down for years with an old dog and small business. I finally get to use them for an upcoming trip to Norway and should do a practice packing session because I’ve been doing it in my head for weeks. Our business is almost sold now and we are so excited to finally plan a trip to Portugal too!
I am like you: NOT a math person, however my menfolk who supposedly score highly in spacial reasoning tasks are absolutely out of their depth in packing refrigerators, freezers, cars and suitcases. Drew will look at the items to go into a vehicle (lots of experience recently with packing cars for long haul excursions and cross country moves) and will shake his head "No, won't fit". I saw "Watch!" I love packing cubes (and you have had a massive influence on me) On our Covid Europe trip I particularly loved the skinny narrow "cubes" (which were actually rectangular) as I discovered that they were labeled 1,2,3, and 4 and I could squeeze all of our combined clothing for a day into each one so that 4 days of outfits were easy to grab- very handy on a trip with lots of stops. I am fascinated by this lesson. I have several adventures coming up for which I'll be able to use this information!