A short while ago it did seem like my preparations for the tour were well ahead of where they needed to be. But now, as is illustrated in the picture, time seems to be just melting away.Today it is 4 months until the start of my tour of the USA. Maybe I just imagining it, but I seem to have accomplished little over the past few weeks in getting things ready. I guess it is just a guy thing – give us one or two things to think about and we can cope very well. Give us a lot of things to do and we seem to drift from one to another, without really getting much finished. I think I have to many things to do at the moment, so I am going to revert to type and do what I always do in these circumstances – start writing a list of what needs to be done, then get satisfaction as I strike each one off as being completed!
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9 comments:
I am a list type of guy also. I find it helpful to do what you are planning to do. It will all come together.
Gary:
It doesn't matter how long you have. 4 months, 1 year, 1 week, it all boils down to the same thing. Whenever I go anywhere I too make a list of things to bring. It is never about the clothes or shoes, it is always the tools, netbook, hard drive, camera, lenses, cables, chargers, cel phone. Whatever time you have that is how long it takes to figure all of this out. Then when you are down to two days left, you chuck a few clothes into your bag and your done. It's like the bank. Whatever time it closes, you arrive 10 minutes before
bob
bobskoot: wet coast scootin
And here I thought only Germans and other people known to have obsessive-compulsive disorders would make lists for travel planning. Personally I enjoy the pre-travel phase, the information gathering, and checking off the to-do-lists almost as much as I love the travels itself.
List always work for us! I forget all kinds of things without one. :-b
I find for myself that I've done a whole lot of preparation subconsciously over quite a period of time. I rarely pack for a trip until a couple days before ... often the day before leaving. However, things like camera and computer gear are packed from lists, as are clothes. The physical act comes only after much rumination.
I don't make lists because it is just another thing to remember. I've already got reservations for a couple of stops this summer and the rest will be on-the-fly moments. I might forget something at home, but I've been on the road enough to have a good idea of what I need. As for specific planning, I have a schedule for the week Linda is with me and the rest will depend on which fork in the road calls loudest.
Oz – I cannot operate without lists. Part of my job was to work out how to build very large construction projects and that included preparing time schedules of the work – to do that you had to list all of the construction operations that needed to be done and then work out the timing and sequencing of each. It was like a huge long list. I did that for a large part of my career, so writing lists is now an ingrained part of my everyday life. Plus I have such a poor memory that I would leave my head behind if it wasn’t bolted on!
Bob – It’s never about the clothes is right. Out of curiosity I check my current “to take on the tour” spreadsheet and there are total of 164 items and of these only 13 are for clothes. OK, my list currently includes things like the software I need to load onto the new netbook I bought for the tour, but the percentage of clothes is still very small.
Sonja – I totally agree with you about enjoying the pre-travel phase, but as working out how to do things was my job, then that isn’t surprising I guess. I think we must enjoy doing the pre-travel time because we are beginning to live the trip in our minds. We are thinking about what will happen on the trip, where we might go and what we might see. Somehow writing a list of what we might need gives us pleasure because it is helping to put our minds in a place where it is easier to then think about how we will use the things we are writing the lists about. Maybe.
Or maybe that’s just not right and we do it because of what William and Mary said – we would otherwise just forget all kinds of things!
Chuck – I agree, the physical act of packing can come much later. I do set aside the things I have bought specifically for the tour, but everything else doesn’t get packed until just beforehand. That is the beauty of lists – you have mentally already packed the items, so as long as you know they are available and ready, then the lists cuts out the need to physically collect them together early. Much rumination is exactly right.
What I then do the day before is lay everything out on the floor, work out what will fit in and what wont, and then start to eliminate the not so essential items. Probably like most of us that ride motorcycles, I have been buying smaller versions of just about everything over the years just so they can fit in our limited motorcycle luggage space. Actually that gives me an idea for my next post......
Gary, I will be one of the biggest fans of your blog!
AHD - That comment cracked me up!
Rock Chick - I am glad to hear that!
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