And so after over a year of planning, it is nearly time for us to depart!  We are packed and ready, just a few last minute things to get sorted tomorrow before the flight on Tuesday.  I like to totally clean the house just before we depart – makes coming back more palatable…..

Our packing needed some thought.  When we start off, temperatures will be in the 30s… hot….  by the time we finish in mid October up in the high parts of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, we could see the first snow flurries…. in between, hopefully it will be largely very warm, but with very changeable mountain weather – rain showers very possible.  It’s all very changeable.  Added to those complications, we are sailing home from New York at the end on Queen Mary 2, so we need to take formal wear for that.

We have booked an extra 20kg of luggage with Norwegian Airlines (our transatlantic flight), so 60kg in total and they also offer 10kg of hand luggage each (we probably need about 6kg each).  We don’t want to be trailing too much stuff on a trip like this though, where we are unpacking and packing a lot.  We are, after all, staying in well over 30 locations during the course of our road trip.  Anyway, we’ve tried to pack as light as we can.  Our cruise wear is in one suitcase and a kind friend in Colorado has agreed to hold that case for us for our trip.  We will drop it on our first day and pick it up again in our last week, before we head for the East Coast.

Luckily everywhere we’re going during our road trip will be super casual, so shorts, t shirts, light trousers, shirts and a couple of summer dresses will be fine.  We are also packing walking shoes, poles and casual shoes of course.  A light rain jacket each with detachable thermal linings, rain ponchos, sun hats, light backpacks, binoculars and monbocular, SLR camera, Gopro and electronics.   Thermal hats, scarves and gloves, a couple of sweaters for the late season.  Maps, guidebooks and our GPS for the car.  iPad and Surface tablet.  Kindles.  Bathroom products and suncare we will buy along the way, not use precious baggage weight for them. We also decided not to take thick coats.  If it turns really cold before we leave, we will make a run to Walmart and pick up a couple of cheap puffa jackets.  We can do laundry along the way.  Not everywhere but in quite a few places so that will help a lot.

We have friends who’ve raved about packing cubes and we saw them in operation on our recent yachting holiday.  Our suitcase and limited cupboard space looked like a jumble sale.  Our friends’ organised cubes looked much better.  Anyway, we bought 2 packs of 6 per pack on Amazon.  They were about £20 per set and you get 1 large, 2 medium, 2 small and 1 oddment size.  There are lots of ways to organise these cubes and we may adapt as we go along.  For now we have a set each and we’ve organised them by type of clothes, so, underwear in one, t shirts in another, shorts and swimmies in another, dresses and blouses in another… cosmetics and odds and ends in one.  Simple medical kit. I am thinking that along the way we could try having the following day’s clothes in one so we just lift that out in the morning and reload that night…. we will have to see how we get on.  Certainly it has made our cases seem more spacious and more accessible already.  They just stack in to each corner and space of the case and they take a lot in each cube.  I have rolled things like underwear and t shirts and folded dresses and blouses and shirts.  Each cube has a carrying handle so that you can easily just lift them out.  Some cubes (we don’t have these) are double sided so that you could, for example, put dirty clothes on the opposite side.  Anyway, so far, a very favourable impression.

So excited for this trip and I hope you enjoy reading about some or all of it as we go along…..