Packing Day

Sue and I designated today (Sunday) as "packing day."  It was time to figure out what was going and what was staying.  And then, how would we fit everything into its respective box/bag.  No easy task when you have much more stuff than when you came (and there are only so many kids clothes and shoes that you can leave behind).  Thankfully, we sent home two bags early (Sue's sister Sarah and a colleague Sarah who took home a bag from the conference in France).  As you'll see below, that helped a great deal!

And we had very, very generous help today.  Loulou volunteered to take the kids for the day.  I dropped them off around 10a and Loulou and Carlo entertained them with playing, watching movies, baking a cake, lunch, etc.  She brought them back at 5:30p!  You cannot imagine how much easier packing went when Sue and I could work through things without having every decision second guessed by the peanut gallery.  And you should have seen us ... we had a piece of paper that listed every box/bag, how much it currently weighed, and then how much all the stuff that we still had to pack weighed (e.g., swimsuits:  3.5 pounds, clothes in laundry:  5.2 pounds, medication buckets:  5.0 pounds, etc.).  We would look at the volume and the weight left in the bag/box and try things out until everything fit within the 50.4 pound (23 kg) limit.  Two engineers at their finest :-)

Anyway, in the end, we leave like the way we came:  4 boxes, 2 suit cases, 2 duffel bags (all 8 of these loaded to about 48 pounds), 2 roller-boards, 4 packpacks, 2 car seats and 1 honey bear.  We will be a site tomorrow night heading to the airport to check-in.  Which, by the way, we are doing the night before so that we don't have to show up much earlier and have that stress the (early) morning of the departure.  Isn't that a nice service (allowing you to check in the day before)?  We certainly think so and had never heard of it (another thank you to Loulou for telling us about this!).

Postscript (Monday):  We made it!

Hard to see ... 4 boxes, 2 suitcases, 2 duffle bags,  2 car seats in our entry way. 

Three cart's worth of luggage at the Graz Flughafen.

23 kg per bag gave us a limit of 184 kg ... what were we worried about?!