Practice Packing

Now, I'm not a high-maintenance packer. My mantra when I travel is something along the lines of, "if it's not my passport or my plane ticket, I can buy it when I get there." (Add to that, of course, 'or my music/uniform' for choir tours.) That being said, this tour is presenting its own special set of travelling challenges.

We're travelling on a charter airline for the first leg of our journey, from Calgary to London; each passenger is allowed only 20kg of checked luggage and 5kg of carry-on. And because we're going through London, that carry-on amount must all fit in one single bag: no purses, plastic bags, camera cases -- nothing, in short, that can't be rolled up and stuffed into the mother carry-on (which, again -- no more than 5kg.) Each of us also will be carrying between 2 to 10kg of choir paraphernalia, things like the beautiful school kits that Wendy Gibb organized, instruments (I got the short straw and have to get a FLUTE inside my suitcase -- no egg shaker or triangle for me!), bamboo poles, and programs.

Packing has become a fairly revered art among the Kokopelli tour group. There's an undercurrent of competition about this in our outwardly non-competitive organization: who can pack less than 25 lbs? less than 20 lbs? Whose suitcase defies the laws of physics and weighs less than 6 lbs while boasting the same cargo capacity as Erin Lange's smart car? Who can fit the most clothes in their carry-on without having it explode in a shower of Gravol and travel pillows? While I'm impressed by some of the feats people are achieving in practice-packing ("My checked luggage weighs 20 oz. and that includes four of the bamboo poles!") my directorial side is starting to worry that we'll arrive in cold, cold Cape Town with 80 papier-maché-wearing singers!

Some helpful travel packing tips:

1. Be 'patient zero' when it comes to the infamous Tour Cold. The first person to get sick benefits from everyone else's hoarded tissues, Cold FX, cold medication, and sympathy. (Later in the tour there'll be less sympathy and more outright disgust.) This way, you can bypass packing your own supplies. (Note: the best way to make sure you achieve 'patient zero' status is to systematically start depriving yourself of sleep for the week before travel. Scott and I are currently tied for this, with Kim pulling in a close third behind us.)

2. Remember -- the airline can't weigh *you*. While Scott's shrewdly recruited his small-framed mother to exploit this fact ("She's wearing a giant coat with a hundred pockets, and each one is holding a collapsible bamboo pole!"), I think we should take this to the next level. Why not swallow some of our luggage? Think how much carry-on space we could conserve if everyone ate 5 kg of ziploc baggies containing tour programs!

3. Think of items you can pick up along the way. Why bring travel shampoo when you can use the shampoo at the hotel? Scott has expanded this concept even to the singers on tour -- why bring basses and tenors when you can pick some up in Africa?

4. Electronic versions of things weigh less. Just think -- 5000 songs on an iPod vs. 500 CDs, or 30000 digital photos vs. seventeen photo albums, or 30 hours of plane-ride video files vs. several dozen VHS tapes. For that matter, consider this electronic blog vs. the old travel diary I took last time! Electronic is clearly the way to travel!

As many of you know, the new Harry Potter book is coming out while we're away; the die-hard Harry Potterites among us probably wanted to re-read the first 84 books to refresh our memories before digging into the adventures of Harry Potter aged 35 or whatever he is by now. But the combined Potter opus in analog (i.e., paper) format weighs a good 8kg (roughly 4 bamboo poles). The same books in digital format (I'm thinking audio book here, but don't let me stop you from scanning all the pages of each book into a PDF file if that's more authentic to you) weigh -- okay, I actually don't know how much a megabyte weighs, let alone its bamboo pole equivalency (BPE) -- but I bet it's considerably less!

Actually, why not apply this to the choir itself? An average chorister weighs about 65 kg (or 24 BPE) -- times 80, that's a whole lot of room we could use for important things like travel packs of gum and extra uniform shoes. I say we should convert the whole choir into electronic files, start living in the digital age! We can ship Kokopelli to Africa via e-mail and waive the airline costs entirely!

Next time on the blog -- what to do when stuck in Gatwick Airport for 14 hours (that works out to about 23 hours, Greenwich Mean Time).