Packy Mc Packy! How to pack for a family gap year!

UPDATE — the house is packed up and it’s weird. It feels a little bit and all a bit REAL! No going back now…

I’ve been the packing witch for the trip and quite frankly it has been harder than I thought!

How on earth do you pack for 6 months on the road — we are going to (mostly) hot places which is a breeze (don’t pardon the pun!), but also some trekking in Nepal and some cooler weather in a couple of places like Egypt.

Here’s where I ended up — and we even went through all of this and cut it AGAIN by a quarter. We are literally wearing the same things over and over again!

In terms of how to make it all *fit*, we have gone with Eagle Creek packing cubes, each of us in a different colour. They ARE spenny but are really solid and won’t break like the rubbish Amazon ones we have (that we are using for other items). We each have a medium, small and shoe cube.

The kids packing

• 2 x shorts
• 1 x ‘performance’ (!) mosquito repellent trousers (Crag Hoppers Mosilife range) that convert to shorts
• 1 x extra ‘performance’ thin trousers
• 1 x long sleeved mosquito repellent t shirt (Crag Hoppers, again)
• 1 x thin fleece hoodie (Mountain Warehouse)
• 1 x cap
• 4 x t shirts
• 1 x short PJs (that could pass as clothes!)
• 7 x pants (special quick drying ones)
• 5 x socks
• 1 x rain jacket each
• Waterproof trekking trainers (Salomon and Merrells)
• Waterproof sandals (Merrells and Tevas)
• A cotton sleeping bag sheet (hello, bed bugs!)
• Dock & Bay travel towel
• Eye mask, ear plugs
• Sunglasses with sunglass neck thing
• Home school shizzle — one book for diary/ home skool, C has coloured pens, H has coloured pencils
• One VERY small packing bag for travel treasures — bigger things we’ll send home

What didn’t make the cut…

Flip flops and any meaningful amount of clothes, haha!

A lovely dress

More shorts

More of everything LOL!

Henry’s clothes

Ali’s packing

• 1 x Uniqlo down jacket
• 4 x t shirts — cheapies from H&M, one sports one
• 1 x vest top
• 1 x shorts
• 1 x long skirt
• 1 x thin mossie trousers that convert to shorts
• NO rain jacket — relying on a cap and poncho for the jungle. Will buy an umbrella in Japan as it’ll probably rain there
• 7 x pants (thin, quick drying ones)
• 3 x period pants & a moon cup — moon cup for the WIN, it’s amazing, game changer. Swimming is no longer an issue at all! Don’t ask me about it or I will bore you for hours about how brill moon cups are!
• 1 x bikini & rash vest
• 5 x socks (seems a lot but we’ll need them trekking and Japan)
• Eye mask, ear plugs
• Luxury item — travel tempur pillow — I toyed with this for ages cos its big heavy BUT I’m an old bird now and it hurts my neck if I don’t!
• Other luxury items — hair mask to protect from the sun (dyed hair innit!) and mascara & eyeliner — was gonna go makeup free but hey, treat yoself!

Ts packing list

• 1 x mossie shirt (for the jungle)
• 1 x long sleeve t shirt
• 1 x shorts
• 2 x trousers (one that turns into shorts)
• 1 x rash vest & swim shorts
• 3 x t shirts
• 5 x socks
• 7 x pants
• travel towel
• And I thought *I* was travelling light LOL!

ALL THE THINGS — everything else that quite frankly takes more room than our clothes! We will be topping up along the way

Toiletries

• Shampoo, conditioner bar
• Suncream
• Hair cutting scissors (fringe, kids, multipurpose)
• Antibac — SO MUCH!
• 1 bog roll
• Toothbrush/ toothpaste — using bamboo brushes I bought from https://myreusables.com who I met at a school fair. She was awesome 🙂
• Deodorant
• Hair brush
• Hair mask & UV hair protector — Ali’s luxury items
• NO razor — laser hair removal for the WIN! T is also going to grow his backpacking Armish beard!

Electronics

We got a clever little storage case to keep all our bits together

• USB memory stick — SO year 2000, but useful for printing home skool shizzle on the road
• Headphones — kids have over ear ones, T and I have in ear ones (sad times, I love my over ear ones, but space!)
• 4 in one adaptor thing — 4 USB chargers attached to a universal plug adaptor
• 1 x portable charger
• 4 x Kindles — I have a beautiful vision of us having ‘kindle reading’ nights but the reality is the kids will want to watch endless hours of Mr Beast on YouTube, haha!
• 1 x dry bag for electronics — this also doubles up as my day bag
• 4 x cables for our electronics
• 2 x mobile phones — Ali & Ts
• 1 x Google ChromeBook — for home school, kids entertainment, flights etc

Basic medical kit

We are refilling mossie and suncream on the road.

• Antiseptic cream
• Dioralyte
• Immodium — and a kids version (they aren’t allowed it)
• After bite cream
• Antihistamine pills — covers the kids and us
• Calpol tablets (kids)
• Motion sickness bands
• Tweezers, nail clippers
• A couple of (old) covid tests
• Plasters
• Deet mosquito roll-on
• Canesten — a multipurpose for the tropics!
• Mosquito wrist bands for the kids — they last 15 days once we hit the rainforest. Prevention is definitely our policy
• Malaria pills — again, a tough decision but Bali is our last stop before Tanzania and we just thought safer to take them with us for the kids. We also made a difficult decision on Tanzania vs South Africa because of malaria pills. But we skipped larium (good lord, the 00s on larium were CRAZY!) and are going with a safer option (with prevention being our main method of prevention). We also chatted to our amazing safari company, who have kids themselves, and they said where we are going and the time of year, it’s relatively okay.
• The downside is they take up a lot of space — Charlotte needs to take them 3 x a day (due to her weight). These will live in the kids backpacks as very light.

Miscellaneous

• Blow up booster seats — I was THRILLED when I realised Charlotte is tall enough to dispense with this item! I’m not convinced on this one — I think most places won’t have seat belts (!) but if needs be we can jetison.
• 1 x reuasable shopping bag
• Masking tape — for mossie nets and random stuff
• (flight) Sick bags in ALL of our backpacks. We learnt our lesson from Crete, let’s hope we don’t need them! We nicked them in the summer
• Reusable straws and plastic cutlery — see below re plastic free
• Copies of important shizzle — passports, birth certificates, passport photos, vaccine info, international drivers licences
• 2 x RFID travel pouches
• Face masks
• Spare shoe laces
• A few rain ponchos — apparently essential for Borneo
• Victorinox travel knife — decided against a full swiss army knife
• Vegetable peeler — so we can try and stay healthy and peel fruit/ veg!
• Washing powder sheets
• Snack bag for the kids — nothing big, just something we can throw in the day bag
• Vitamins & probiotics (Delhi belly!)
• Playing cards/ travel games pack
• Low denomination dollars — hide a bit in the kids clothes just in case
• Road ID travel bracelets for the kids — for both trainers and wrists — we decided against air tags because they tend to work best when surrounded by apple phones (which we won’t be)
• Snorkel masks for the kids — harder to buy/rent on the road and we’ll be using them from Borneo onwards (a fair bit)
• Swimming goggles
• 1 x swim ball to throw in a pool
• Blow up noodles for the kids — see above
• Fix it bits — needle/ thread, masking tape, rubber bands, safety pins
• Phone lanyard thing for the water and for when we are out and about
• A few clothes pegs — for fixing curtains shut and hanging some washing

Decided against — mosquito nets — we can always buy on the road, we will also buy those plug in things to take us round

Water

It feels like this one needs a separate section. This was something we agonised over — I am VERY keen to avoid single use plastic water bottles. If I think back to our travels in 2002 it makes me *wince*. There are a gazillion options out there BUT do they take out giardia (which is most places we are going) and viruses. Lots are fancy filter options but you have to replace them and they don’t all remove them — can you pick them up in the wilds of Nepal? Probably not…actually probably in Kathmandu, but you get the point.

So we have decided on a UV Steripen — you wiggle it in 1l of water for 90 seconds and it completely clears it. Game changer!

We also have a Life Straw systems filter bottle (but it only makes 0.75l once you account for the filter. But we will mostly just use it as a water bottle cos we have the steripen.

We have also bought a 2.5l Osprey water reservoir for the day bag.

Plus one AirUp between the kids cos the water could taste weird and they are OBSESSED with them!

SO many things *didn’t* make the cut

• Collapsible travel cups — no coffee where we are going!
• Birthday candles -I mean really, who has space for these!
• Hair straighteners — a joke, I’m not that kinda gal!
• Baby wipes (environment)
• Tiger balm
• Medical tape and bandages — I hope this isn’t a terrible idea
• Air tags — they only generally have accurate locations with lots of iphones around so we decided against
• External hard drive — just gonna back up to Amazon photos