Are you planning a road trip, camping vacation, or other holiday where all you have to rely on to transport you, your family or friends and all of everybody’s luggage is your usual vehicle? While this can be easy enough if you have a massive truck or SUV, in a regular car it can be a bit of a tricky exercise in space use! However, by following a few easy tips it can be manageable. Here is some advice for packing your car for a vacation with other people and some luggage!
Vacuum Pack Clothes!
You know those space saving bags you can buy for your home where you put all your stuff in and suck the air out with a hoover, leaving you with an airtight, waterproof and crucially, much smaller bag full of stuff? Well, those are not just great for storing things in your home, but also for packing them for a vacation when storage space in your vehicle is limited. They can cut the space your clothes take up by a huge amount, and can also be used for other things like sleeping bags, pillows and kids’ soft toys, allowing you to cut a lot of space on things that are not especially heavy but can seem bulky when they are simply folded up. The obvious problem with this is getting them back into their vacuum packed state for the trip home, but a portable ‘Dust Buster’ style vacuum can help, or, if you are staying at a friend’s home, you can simply use their hoover.
Capsule Wardrobes
One thing that can help you control how much you have to take is to plan outfits ahead, and base them on a few key pieces. From a fashion perspective the ‘capsule wardrobe’ has long been a concept people have used to create a set of different looking outfits they can wear for a fashion season based on a few items, and this works just as well for a vacation. You may be able to get by with a lot less stuff if you think about things you can mix and match, allowing you to have day and evening looks (if you are going somewhere you may need to go out and look smart at night) based on the same summer dress or pants and shirt you could wear in the day, just by changing light things like jewelry and shoes or adding a wrap, cardigan, light jacket or scarf.
Protect Your Car
All the stuff you need to pack for your vacation may possibly damage the upholstery in your vehicle’s trunk or even cause more serious damage as it shifts around during the journey. It is therefore good advice to make sure you have good cargo liners in place to help keep the vehicle itself safe from this kind of trouble! These can be inexpensive to buy and very fast to fit, so it pays to invest in them rather than deal with scrapes and grazes to the interior of your trunk as a result of hauling your stuff on your road trip!
