Homes for Things on the Road
luggage cubes and other tactics
If, like me, you lack a natural propensity for order (yes, that is a euphemism), you may find that things get notably worse while traveling.
Bags become what my Scottish husband refers to as “fuggidins”, as they contain everything from passports to actual garbage. All is mixed together; nothing is contained in its own category.
The car interior is chaos - essentially a larger bag with more room to fit things. If you have children, the backseat floor will be a mixture of electronic objects, sand, potato chips and art supplies. If you travel by train or bus, your detritus and ephemera is continually bursting the seams of your territory, spilling into the center isle to trip your fellow passengers and rile the attendants.
If you find yourself in this situation, you clearly need Homes for your objects. In my experience, luggage cubes are the essential tool for keeping order “on the road”.
This is a set of luggage cubes (and yes, they are rectangular, not square, and some of them are bags, but they are commonly called “cubes”):
They will transform a situation like this:
Into this:
They help you out from start to finish:
when packing, they allow you to clearly see whether you have enough underwear to get you through the week
you can use them to separate your own clothing into subcategories such as undergarments, tops, bottoms, fancy stuff, workout clothes, etc.
you can use them to separate one traveller’s clothing from another’s, thus preventing everyone’s clothes to be mixed together like salad
you can use one of them to subcategorize an overnight bag so you don’t have to drag the whole suitcase into a roadside motel room
you can take them right out of the suitcase and place them in the drawers at your destination
you can take them back out of the drawers at the end of the week and put them back in your suitcase
you can designate one or more of them for dirty laundry as clothing gets worn
And when you return home, it is clear what clothing is still clean, and can be put away, and what needs to go into the washing machine: no need for sorting and smelling!
The luggage cubes provide homes for each person’s objects of clothing, but to keep things tidy in the car, the inn, etc. you need to create additional homes for things. And when you have created the homes, you have to be strict with yourself (and travel-mates) to use them.
A bag with various compartments can help you keep order:
Or it can just become a fuggidin:
All depends on how you use it.
For car travel, a designated garbage bag is essential. If you are transporting children, it should be placed in the middle of the backseat floor, in arm’s reach of everyone. Also, I have found lately that having fewer car snacks is generally beneficial, as a big bag of groceries contributes to the chaos, and when traveling, one can do a lot of eating out of boredom. Try a podcast instead!
At your auntie’s house, or hotel or cruise ship cabin, it is helpful to designate a landing spot for each person’s objects. A chair, a quadrant of a desk - just a reasonable amount of space in which each traveler is permitted to place things such as keys, books, bags, sunglasses, stuffed animals won on boardwalks, etc.
And if your room isn’t cleaned each day by a hotel housekeeper, do it yourself. A quick re-ordering takes very little time and makes a big difference.
The important part - as with cleaning your home - is keeping up with it each day. In that way, a relatively small effort will be rewarded with an ordered environment in which you can easily locate things. Especially while traveling, this reduces stress and contributes to relaxation and enjoyment.
(My husband says his recommendation for keeping yourself neat and clean while traveling is don’t travel with children.)