I've been re-reading Martin van Creveld's classic book "Supplying War" that deals with logistics. At the same time I'm getting ready to start packing for a trip to England, so matters such as future needs, carrying capacity and transportability are clearly on my mind.
Given human variability on many dimensions, it follows that some people are skilled at packing for trips and there are others who are not -- even though they might be fairly frequent travelers.
Packing for a road trip is comparatively simple where only one or two people are involved and the vehicle is not tiny: there's usually enough space available to allow for overpacking. Air travel is another matter due to constraints of weight and, recently, the per-item charges for luggage.
My sister, who favors out-of-the-way destinations is able to confine her items to a backpack and a couple of smaller shoulder bags. It helps that she has no need to pack for dress-up occasions such as many cruise passengers have to face.
Then there is another lady I knew well who consistently overpacked. A trip to Europe would have her fill two suitcases to their weight limit despite my consistent warnings that she was certain to buy gifts and personal items and needed some extra room to allow for that. Usually what happened was that she would buy a small, cheap piece of luggage en-route to accommodate what she indeed bought overseas. Another problem she had was deciding what to pack, having a large wardrobe to choose from. Basically, she wanted to have a costume for every social contingency. But at the same time had trouble dealing with possible changes in the weather, being fixated by what she saw through the window while packing, assuming that would be what she's experience on the trip. I tried to be helpful by telling her what weather forecasts were saying, but this didn't sink in very far. Therefore, she was constantly complaining that she didn't pack the items she really needed. To me the oddest part of all this was that she never really changed her packing style despite the problems it had caused on many previous trips.
As for me, I like to think that I do a reasonably sensible job of trip-packing. Even if that's so, almost inevitably I discover at some point in the journey that I had forgotten to include an item of real importance. My upcoming England trip should be easy to pack for because the predicted weather there is close to what Seattle's weather has been recently. For instance, that allows me to gauge how thick or waterproof a jacket I'm likely to need. Of course, I'm probably still doomed to get something wrong.
No matter how good you think you are at packing, the length of the trip and future weather conditions conspire against getting it right. Weather forecasts become increasingly unreliable more than a week ahead, so one must allow for a wider range of possibilities than indicated. Another difficulty is packing for destinations with different climates. Sometimes my late wife and I would visit Hawaii and the Bay Area, California around Christmas / New Year's, all on the same journey. So we'd need to be wearing warm, water-resistant clothing for Seattle weather at each end of the trip, semi-tropical duds for the Islands, and fairly warm items for northern California. Combining these needs with a limited amount of luggage space, requires a lot of careful thought along with the certainty that the result will be inadequate in some respects.
If you have a trip planned in the near future, I wish you the best of fortune when it comes to packing.
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