One of the more obvious but less thought-about things about training trip is that it is a trip.
Which means you have to pack.
As a college student, packing has become a large part of my life for the last few years. At the end of the summer, I most of the stuff I own at home and cart it off to school. Then I unpack it into my dorm room. I pack stuff to go home with me on breaks (probably too much stuff) and then have to pack it back up to bring it back. At the end of the school year, I pack ALL my stuff back up and bring it back home.
I loathe packing.
The special thing about training trip is that I'm not flying to Florida from home. Instead, my parents (generously) drove me back to Oberlin so I can fly down to Cleveland with the team.
That makes packing interesting. Consider the factors:
1) I brought cold-weather clothing home, because it is cold at home.
2) I need warm-weather clothing to take to Florida, because it is warm in Florida (this varies, but that is a story for another day)
3) I need to pack my cold-weather clothing to bring it back to Oberlin, where I will need it for another three and a half months because it doesn't warm up here anytime soon.
4) All my warm-weather clothing is at Oberlin, because it's blisteringly hot there for the four weeks of school when it's not cold.
So this means that I have to pack my clothing (and books and Christmas presents and legal documents) at home, cart them to Oberlin, unpack everything, and then repack everything for Florida all the day that I get there.
This is less then fun.
Luckily, there are a few things that work in my advantage, mostly the fact that I'm living alone in my generously large double for Winter Term, so that I can simply leave all the unpacked cold-weather clothing sitting around until I get back from Florida and have more time to put them away.
One problem?:
I haven't unpacked yet. Oops.
I feel like there's a business opportunity for professional packers. You could hire them to come into your home, tell them what needed to be packed in what case, and then they would get to it and you could sit back and drink sangria. I know I'd hire them.
ReplyDeleteNow see, I would do this for money. The hard part of packing is choosing what to take and what cases to use and getting it all out. If the clients would do that, the remaining work (putting it all into the cases) is the easy part. Actually, it's even kind of fun, because there is the challenge of packing in as efficient and orderly manner as possible: folding the clothes so that they fit in the best way into the case, choosing items to fill up the little spaces, layering clothes in the order in which you plan to wear them, finding places to put things so that you can pull them out without disarranging the whole suitcase as you live out of it....all this is recreational for the order-obsessed. I am aware that I didn't manage to pass this obsession on to either of my sons, but maybe that's actually a good thing.
ReplyDeleteyour post makes me miss college (some things at least)
ReplyDelete