Travel light with Planepack: enjoy your mobile home
Big is not always the best
For our first trip to New Zealand, Mr PetMan and I decided to rent a mobile home. We wanted to see as much as possible of South Island during our two-week holiday. Driving our own accommodation made sense: we could stop and stay wherever we wanted.
In those days, I was already traveling light, carrying only a small suitcase. Mr PetMan hadn’t yet made that transition.
On the day of departure, he heaved his red suitcase into the back of the taxi.
‘What have you got in there?’ I asked.
‘Not much’, he replied, ‘just my clothes and a few other things.’
Travel light in a mobile home
The problem occurred when we took possession of our mobile home: there isn’t much packing space inside the vehicle. It’s like a ship: everything has its place and those places are small.
‘What are you going to do with your suitcase?’ I asked. ‘It doesn’t seem to fit anywhere,’ I added, finding it hard to keep a tone of annoyance out of my voice: why hadn’t Mr PetMan thought about it?
‘Oh, it’s fine here,’ he responded, placing the big red suitcase in the middle of the passage.
This passage was in the middle of the mobile home, in effect our sitting area, our dining room and our bed.
At night time, Mr PetMan moved the suitcase between the bed and the bathroom: not good for clambering over when I had to go to the toilet in the middle of the cold night.
So it wasn’t fine for me. For the whole trip I stepped onto or over the suitcase that filled our mobile home living space.
I self-righteously had done the right thing by storing my suitcase under the seating area - which is where suitcases were meant to be packed, I reminded Mr PetMan, but of course his bag was too big to fit so I suffered that inconvenience.
Converting to light travel
Mr PetMan never acknowledged that I was right and he was wrong about traveling with such a big bag, but he has over time learnt that he doesn’t need to take a big suitcase.
These days Mr PetMan travels with hand luggage only, just like I do.
Notwithstanding the big red suitcase, we both loved the Maui.
