The Night Before A Road Trip

It may seem like road trips and their prep work are all rainbows and sunshine. Often us aspiring travel writers post beautiful pictures of the amazing sights along with way, or photos of a carefully packed van ready to hit the open road. I know I’ve shared some of my super-organized itinerary work on this page. That is not the whole story!

For our family, there is nothing glamorous about the night before a trip.It is a tremendous amount of work. It often involves frantic laundry-doing (because at least one person is running out of something necessary), looking for misplaced things (we lost our bike pump this time), last minute shopping for misplaced things, a fridge and freezer bursting with camp food that nobody is allowed to eat yet, and usually me fretting that I should have allowed more time for all this stuff.

The title of this post should really be “Messy Piles and Lists”. These things abound in our pre-trip household. Here are some behind-the-scenes photos of our Respect the Van prep work:

Exhibit A: Messy Lists that are constantly changing. The to do list on the right has been updated since last night and is now completely out of space.

Exhibit B: The Pile by the front door that is still too small. Everybody’s bag should be here. They are not yet for unknown reasons.

Exhibit C: The Food Bin, a large assortment of mostly non perishable foods. The bread carefully placed on top will be squished in no time.

Exhibit D: The camping stuff pile; this is the one that stays in the garage until it’s time to load the car. Note the messy basement things behind it that make it very easy for forget to pack something in the pile.

The outcome of all this? We left almost exactly at the time we planned. I stopped using the list at some point in packing the car because I misplaced it. So, we forgot pillows for adults, luckily an easy item to replace. We forgot a couple cold food things, also no big deal. Next up, trip details!