Embracing Travel Panic

Photo credit: Krysten_N, Creative Commons

I'm having one of those rare days of travel panic, when something in my brain wants to freak out and I can't quite find the right button to push to calm it down and turn off the nerves. I keep telling myself that I'm going to be in Australia for a solid two months, if not longer, before I head anywhere else, and there's no essential I could possibly forget that I can't get in Sydney, for heaven's sake, but today it just isn't working. I'm good at tamping down panic and pushing past nerves when I can't get rid of them, but they're still there and after 12 hours of feeling them bounce around in my head and my stomach, they're starting to drive me a little nuts.

Between the two browsers I use, there are 39 tabs open on my screen right now, since my usual go-to method of dealing with travel panic is to flood it out by reading up (again) on where I'm going. Five deal with travel logistics, from one on AAA's site about International Driving Permits (good news: only $15 through AAA!) to my obsessive monitoring of the price of short-hop flights between Sydney and Hobart. One is my daily check of the Aussie-USD exchange rate, which got slightly less of a wince today, since it's back down to parity after a painful jump to USD$1.02 last week. One is Amazon.com's comprehensive list of content available for the Kindle in the U.S., sorted with lowest price ($0.00) first, which I'm slowly making my way through, loading up my new Kindle before I take off (not that I can't continue to do that from anywhere in the world). Ten are blog posts that have caught my eye throughout the day that I'm slowly making my way through, and three are news sites, two of them Australian.

The other 19? Gadgets, gizmos and travel "essentials" that I'm still debating the necessity of buying before I leave for Sydney, three weeks from today. Looking at those pages makes me think about where in my luggage I would stow those things, which then leads me down into the death spiral of packing panic. How am I going to fit my life into 70 pounds, plus carry-ons? My pack needs to be totally ready to head to Tasmania less than 48 hours after I land in Australia, with any non-Tassie trip items easily accessible so I can pull them out and dump them in a drawer until I get back to Sydney. Did I order the right kind of travel laundry soap? How cold is it actually going to be during the winter? Oh yikes, I'm arriving in the middle of beach season and I'm pasty and I hate swimsuits. Okay, getting off track here...

All of this is compounded by the fact that I just spent a large chunk of my savings to pay my rent in Australia for the entire year, and that I've been chasing my tail trying to get a Capital One credit card, with its coveted no foreign transaction fees guarantee, for three weeks. The card, for which I had to send yards of paperwork proving I actually live at the address I claim to inhabit (because the postal service delivers all mail in my tiny town to the post office, not to individual residences, making my permanent mailing address a P.O. Box, which credit card companies can't accept, thank you so much, Patriot Act), was supposed to arrive yesterday, at the latest. It didn't, nor did it arrive today, which set those travel panic nerves simmering again as I spent twenty minutes on the phone with Capital One this afternoon to get that card canceled and a new one issued.

Then the service through which I made my travel arrangements emailed to tell me that I had been switched to a different flight between Melbourne and Sydney after my initial flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne. For the fifth time in the three and a half months since I bought my ticket.

Photo credit: Issac Z. Schlueter, Creative Commons

After that, I gave up. Embrace the panic, I thought. You know you'll get past it and get back to pure excitement eventually; maybe letting the panic have its way is the quickest route through it. So I did. I embraced the panic, flipping back and forth between two nearly identical external hard drives I'm considering and obsessing, for the umpty-billionth time, over packing cubes versus compression sacks and whether or not I should invest in a new daypack (because they obviously don't have those in Australia).

I was hip-deep in reviews of travel sheets (because the 500 I've read in the past two months certainly weren't enough) when I overheard my mom on the phone, outlining the first few weeks of my trip for one of her friends. As she talked about my plans to spend a week in Tasmania, then hang out in Sydney for a few days before grad school orientation and treat myself to a Michael Bublé concert the night before my 26th birthday, I looked up from my laptop. She mentioned that my housing was already taken care of through the end of the year, so I could move right into an apartment, and how nice it was that "with all of this Twittering and blogging and Facebook and everything" I was already looking forward to meeting so many of the people I've been talking to in Australia.

With that, the travel panic nerves unknotted and the vague headache that had been plaguing me all day was gone. I remembered that I'm about to go live in Australia, widely believed to be one of the coolest countries on earth, for two whole years! And that, thanks to all of you who read this blog and put up with my yammering on Twitter and Facebook, I'm actually heading there already looking forward to meeting some people who know the country and its customs a lot better than I do, who've made me feel welcome months before my feet will hit Australian soil. Suddenly my world was bright and shiny again, and I couldn't help but smile. (Of course, 20 minutes later, my mom and I were flipping back and forth between some of those same 39 web pages, figuring out what she wants to give me as an early birthday gift before I leave. But we were laughing while we did it!)

So from now on, whenever that travel panic grabs hold, I'm going to embrace it and let myself freak out over the five million unknown things I'm convinced I'm forgetting and obsess about the thirty thousand details I've already taken care of. All the while trusting that, when the time is right, some little ray of sunshine will pierce the foreboding gloom cast by my nerves and send me back to Happy Traveler Land with a smile on my face, excited for the adventures that lie ahead.

A Wandering Student Tackles Packing, Part I

Confession: I'm a pack rat. I've gotten infinitely better about it in the past five years or so, but there was a time not so long ago when I wouldn't let my mom get rid of any of my old stuffed animals, even the ones I completely ignored as a kid. I'm much more practical than I used to be, but I'm still wildly sentimental and afraid of throwing out anything that might possibly be useful somewhere down the road.

My luggage for my first experience studying outside the U.S. was a picture-perfect example of how not to pack that still makes me cringe. For my first semester, I essentially threw every piece of clothing there was a remote possibility I might wear into the large duffel bag, large suitcase and carry-on suitcase I took with me, until I ran out of room. I came to my senses a little bit before winter break and brought half a suitcase of clothes it had become clear I was not going to wear back home with me, but the books, notebooks and souvenirs I accumulated by the end of the year more than made up the difference.

I've since learned how to pack for most travel situations with only carry-on luggage (although being a runner who hates to go more than a day or two without a run sometimes makes that difficult on longer trips), and that empty space in a suitcase won't kill me but is, in fact, a good thing.

Packing for two years in Australia, however, is going to be a challenge.

My first step toward making the process a smooth, efficient one was to buy a backpack, which will be a good way to get things to Australia that will easily convert to being a good way to travel during school breaks. I went to REI while I was in Southern California this past weekend, since I live nowhere near any outdoor stores and the REI a friend of mine works at was right around the corner from my hotel.

I've never bought a pack before, so I did my research before even thinking about actually buying one. I got measured and semi-fitted for a few I was considering months ago, then did some more research. I went into REI thinking I knew which pack I wanted (a women's Osprey Aura 65), but it didn't feel all that great once it was weighted. An incredibly helpful employee named Nelson (hooray for friends of friends!) who is much more knowledgeable about backpacks and how they should fit than I am loaded up four separate packs for me, tweaked the fit and told me what looked good and what didn't to his experienced eye. The Aura seemed to carry the weight too high, I loved the fit of the hip belt in the Gregory I tried on but the shoulder straps felt like they were grinding bone, the REI-brand pack was okay but nothing spectacular and I wasn't thrilled with the idea of a top-loading pack with just one pocket.

Please forgive my terrible photography
skills when it comes to large inanimate
objects that aren't scenery.

 The women's Deuter ACT Lite 60 + 10 SL surprised me. Since there's only one size that you adjust with a series of "rungs" built into the back, I expected it to fit poorly and be too big for my short torso. But once Nelson had adjusted it for my height and we had all of the straps dialed in, it felt great. Twenty pounds isn't a lot of weight, but it was enough to make me seriously uncomfortable with the packs that didn't fit properly; with the Deuter on, I felt like I could walk around all day. I wandered around the store for a while (looking ridiculous since I was wearing a sundress and sandals with no support at all thanks to having been at the local fair all day) and finally decided this was it. The yellow flower that comes with each of these packs is a fun bonus, but it'll be coming off before I head down under. It's pretty, cheerful and I love the color and the little bit of flair it adds, but it screams "I'm a woman - rob me!" just a little too much for comfort. (But good job, Deuter marketing department!) Maybe I'll toss it in to wear in my hair now and then.

Charming, but probably not a good idea for
actual backpacking.

Since I'm going to be living in Australia for two years and will have a semi-permanent base at school, my new pack isn't all I'll take, in the interest of not having to do laundry twice a week and being able to settle in a bit. I'm still debating whether a 60-liter pack qualifies as a carry-on. Largely empty and cinched down this weekend, it fit in the overhead bin just fine and the Southwest employee I asked about it said it was an acceptable carry-on size, but I'm not sure that will be the case when it's full (any opinions on or experiences with this, please let me know!). If I do end up carrying on my pack, I'll check a rolling duffel - maybe two - and carry on a shoulder bag to go under my seat. If not, I'll check my pack and a rolling duffel, and probably carry on a rollerbag and a daypack.

With three-and-a-half months to go before I leave, I'm still feeling pretty ahead of the game (except that now I want to take my pack everywhere with me so I get used to it - and because it's pretty). Next up on the packing checklist: figuring out what's going in the luggage!