My Life Stuffed Into Two Suitcases

When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money. ~Unknown

As marvelous as that advice is, being stranded in the middle of the ocean requires much more packing than just clothes, and unfortunately I'm already bringing every penny I have. So I seem to be doing just the opposite.

The past weeks, yes weeks, have been spent compiling lists of everything I could possibly need in a semester, clothing, shoes, toiletries, school supplies, vitamins, money, documents, books, electronics, etc, etc, etc, and then trying in vain to cut out as much as possible so as to squish everything into the two suitcases I am allowed. Or one suitcase and my backpacking pack to be precise. If I get desperate I will count my backpack as the carry-on that is actually is and bring a second suitcase, but I have learned that too much luggage is nothing but a major pain.

He who would travel happily must travel light. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This sounds easy at first, throw some clothes, money, and my passport into a backpack and be done with it.

Not quite. I guess there's a slight difference between packing to live on a boat, and packing to travel in port. This is school, believe it or not, so I do have to lug around school supplies and textbooks. Thank goodness for the invention of ebooks. I can bring one iPad instead of the 15+ textbooks I need for all of my classes.

And there's also toiletries to think about. The campus store is apparently way overpriced and who knows what's available in the countries where I am going. Ok, I'm sure I could find mostly everything I need, but living in this country, I have been brainwashed into believing that I need a very certain brand of razor blades. It's silly, yes, but would you really want to trust being able to find normal toothpaste in the middle of Africa? Actually I just looked it up and Ghana, surprisingly, has the highest per capita consumption of toothpaste, but I'd rather not spend my precious hours in port searching around for toiletries.

Then there's also medicine and vitamins. I hear that the food aboard the M.V. Explorer consists mostly of potatoes and pasta, so multi-vitamins are a must, as well as protein powder. I care way to much about my health to live on a completely carb diet for an entire semester.

And of course these considerations go on and on but I won't bore you any more. For the benefit of anyone planning on living on a ship for four months though, I wrote my complete packing list on a separate page. I know everyone who posted their packing lists on Facebook in the past weeks was a huge help.