Expert travel tips for packing and unpacking on tours

When your travels involve moving every day (or nearly every day), unpacking and repacking can become a time-consuming grind. Unless you have figured out key survival tips for daily packing and unpacking on tours.

Be it for a bike tour, or perhaps for hiking, running, paddling or even just bus tours, getting in and out of your suitcase for frequent moves for what you need and then gather it all back up again to move along could make you cross such tours off your list. These survival tips from a few who have done this often on bike tours or other travels can save your nerves – and keep you coming back.

Pack light – The less you pack, the less you have to carry, and then spend packing and unpacking. This is the foundation for sanity on tours. Be sure to read this story, “Packing light for travel: smart load-trimming tips.” The key to packing light starts with packing smart. Read more in our story “Pack smart for travel: 10 steps to list, assess, pack.”

Organize – Be organized! This is absolutely essential. Roll your clothes and use color-coded packing cubes and shoe bags, as well as organizers for electronics. That is the start of easy in-and-out of your luggage packing and unpacking system without having to rummage through clothing, shoes, toiletries and a small tangle of plugs and cables. Life is easier with more room for fun. Take a look for more on organization in our story, “Travel organization tips: cube, compress, fold.”

Planning for frequent moves –This is where rolled clothing and cubes are so handy, so you can easily put, for example, bike clothes in one cube, underwear in another, and perhaps some regular street items in another. You can use a smaller one for odds n’ ends (sunglasses, gels, eyeglass keepers,…whatever is small). Then you can just pull what you need, which mussing the rest. Methods for rolling clothing include all tops in one roll and bottoms in another, perhaps outfits rolled together, or maybe cooler-weather clothing in one roll and warm-weather items in another. You choose what you need based on your tour, your activity and your personal preference.

Do not fully unpack – Last thing you want with frequent moves is to spread your stuff all over the room every night, only to have to scramble to gather it up in the morning. A packing and unpacking routine is king for frequent moves on tours. Maintain your own little area or two in a room and ONLY keep things there.

Use a hanging everything-in-one-place toiletry kit – Pull it out, unfurl, and hang at your destination, and “you’re ready to go,” as another traveler told us. Everything is there. In the morning, close it up and into the suitcase it goes. You certainly do not want bottles and baggies all over a bathroom counter if you are moving frequently on tours.

Keep separate piles – For things you will need to carry along with you during the day in a daypack, on a bike or in another tote, try to keep separate areas or stacks in your room. Then, when you are ready to leave the next morning for your day’s adventures, you do not have to go digging and searching for those items of daily need – for example, your smartphone, a snack, some sunscreen, an extra jacket, etc.

Routines, memory aids, lists, and bright colors – To ensure in your morning hurry you still don’t forget a toiletry kit, something that mistakenly rolled under a cabinet or bed, or your charging cable still plugged into the wall, you need a daily routine. These are just some of the things we do to never forget anything in a hotel.

• Work together. We travel often as a duo so BOTH of us do a “room sweep,” as we call it, prior to leaving a hotel room – closet doors are opened, we crouch and look under the bed, bathroom is scanned, night tables glanced at. Two sets of eyes are better than one.
• Make lists. If you fear forgetting things and there are typical things left in forgettable places, make a little list – even laminate it before your departure from home for the tour – and put it on the floor by the door. No way you can walk over it and leave without seeing it. I have done this for snacks or a bottle I have put in a room mini-bar, for example.
• Use brightly colored ties. I have an inflatable neck support travel pillow that I have secured with a bright orange tie. I put this tie on my suitcase’s zipper pull so there is no way I can close the zipper without remembering the pillow in the tousled bed.

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