The Well-Traveled Mama's List of Plane Packing Tips

So, we are traveling this week, heading to the States to wait out the layover between rental homes here in Costa Rica by spending some time with family before my beloved and I head to Tanzania in mid-March and then we all head back here in early April.

And I've been packing. I can't say I follow the same packing science every time I do it, but I will say that having packed our family of seven for long road trips in our own car, 37 hours of bus travel, multiple border crossings on foot and various plane rides, I am, if anything, an experienced packer. So I thought I'd share some tips I've learned along the way.

Road trip packing and plane packing are two totally different things in my mind, and since we are packing for plane travel here, let's go with that one for now. With so many airlines now charging for bags, efficiency is dollars in your wallet, so it's worth the effort to get the packing done right.

For our trip, our family of seven will each carry a back pack as his personal item, and we'll check two bags and carry on one. We'll be in the States a month, but it's not like we need that many clothes, since we'll be staying with family and doing laundry regularly.

So let's work by category, personal items, carry-ons, checked bags.

1. Personal Items:

• Don't underestimate how much packing you can do in these. Remember they are free weight! You can load them up with as much as the carrier can carry! I used to tend to only see these as busy bags and snack holders for the kids and fill them with things to entertain them during the plane ride. Now I still put a few busy bag items and snacks in their back packs, but I also try to use them wisely.
• Pack each person's heaviest pair of shoes in his back pack. Obviously this won't work with say, ski boots, but tennis shoes? Fit easily and all total that's a lot of weight and space saved in your checked bags. My boys are wearing crocs on the plane and each carrying his tennis shoes in his back pack.
• Books are heavy too. So my guys each carry whatever school books and their own personal reading in their packs. Greg and I carry our own books and all the family prayer books we want to take along.
• Put each person's tooth brush and a travel sized tooth paste in a small ziploc bag in his pack. One, it makes it easier when you get to your final destination to start getting people either freshened up or ready for bed, and, two, fresh teeth are a great cure for travel grumpies and plane boredom.
• Tie jackets or sweat shirts to the top handle. Save space and keep them handy for the million times your kids will take them on and off during the trip.
• Mom keeps travel documents, Dad keeps photo copies of travel documents. This everything is in one place for the million times you need to pull it out these days, but their are emergency copies in a second location should some horrible thing happen. I had to replace my passport from a stolen purse recently, at it was a breeze because I had a photocopy of the old one. Carry copies with you and leave copies with someone who can fax to you while traveling if necessary. 

2. Carry-Ons:

• I know so many people love to only carry on if possible. My advice when traveling with kids is to limit carry-ons. It's hard to navigate the airport with lots of people AND lots of stuff in tow. Overhead space is more and more limited all the time, and trying to get everyone seated plus store carry-on luggage can be overwhelming. And it's one more thing to remember when it's time to get off the plane and everyone is antsy and distracted.
• We are taking one carry on this time as I usually do. In it are packed a couple of towels, our pajamas for the first night, and clothes for the following day for each family member. So we are covered if luggage gets lost. We are covered if someone gets sick in an airport (been there, done that). And if all goes well, only one bag has to be opened on the first day and night, which is a sanity saver to be sure. We'll be traveling nearly 18 hours by the time we add plane and car transport. A quick transition to warm showers and pajamas will be really, really helpful.
• If you are bringing gifts or souvenirs to people that you know you will want to access right away, stick them in your carry on inside another small tote bag. It's quick and easy to open and pull out and a better presentation than your belongings strewed all over your hosts' home while you dig for their bag of coffee (well, that's what I'll be carrying anyway).
• You'll likely carry most of your electronics in your back packs, but if you have spare chargers, stick them in your carry on. Easy to find and a handy replacement if someone accidentally leaves on in a random airport electric socket. It happens. I'm telling you.

Checked Bags:

• I have one brilliant solution for making your large suit case packing easier, whether you are plane traveling or road tripping. It is experiential learning at its best. And it is this:

PACK BY DAYS NOT BY PEOPLE.

• Rather than putting some of the children's items in one bag and other's in another and the adults in another, pack three days worth of clothes for the entire family in each bag. 
• While traveling, you can pull one bag out at a time, use up what is in it, close it up and move on to the next.
• You can plan for special clothing needs, climate changes and adventures. If your bags are specific to the days of the trip, stick a little duct tape around the handle and number it.
• I love packing in those large duffle bags that have zipped bottom section under the main compartment. I put socks and underwear, toiletries, and jewelry accessories in the bottom, and then in the main compartment, I roll outfits together, pants and shirt, and pack them rolled up by person.
• It really does cut down on bags somehow. By following my above strategies for personal items and carry ons, everyone has one jacket, both pairs of shoes, pajamas and one outfit already on hand. I can get three outfits per person in each checked bag, giving us a grand total of seven outfits and two sets of pajamas each, two pairs of shoes, socks, underwear, accessories, toiletries, school books, electronics and personal items and snacks for seven people in two checked bags, one carry on, and a backpack per person. 

I hope you'll find these tips helpful next time you need to load your crew up and head out. Have a favorite packing tip to inspire me this week? Leave it below! I need all the help I can get.

If I Got to Pick

The life I live here in missions is a life that places me, for the most part, totally dependent on the Lord, His provision, His timing and His holy will for our lives. It is good. It is the way I really, truly desire to live.

However, it is totally contrary to my personality. I am a girl who likes to have a plan. I wake up in the morning and within the first two sips of coffee could easily tell you how I would prefer the day to play itself out in 15 minute increments. I can plan a vacation in my head complete with packing list at the mere mention of it over a dinner. I am the kind of girl who makes lists for fun, who would willingly pack for someone else simply because I enjoy the opportunity to organize. I once spent the night at a friend's house after a recent move. Our husbands were both out of town for work. There were boxes everywhere and she was totally overwhelmed. By the time she woke up in the morning, I had moved all the boxes to the correct room, labeled her closets and unpacked her kitchen and bathrooms. She had to call me for months afterwards to ask me where things were. It was some of the best fun I have ever had.

So you see, this life I lead can be hard for me at times. The trust it takes to leave timing and planning in God's hands is a huge leap of faith from my natural temperament. So is having five sons, but that's a story for another day. At the time that we left to take up our mission here in Costa Rica as the St. Bryce Foundation, one of the greatest challenges for me personally meant that it left leaving my oldest brother and his wife and his children and the rest of my family as we united with him in his fight against ALS. It was a sticking point for me with God.

My big brothers and I on our first night back in the States
February 2013

But my brother had always one of the most faithful servants of God I have ever met, and I knew he, more than anyone else, would want me to do what God was calling me to do. He assured me of this himself. Shortly after we arrived in the field, he entered into a medical emergency that threatened to end his life. I was horrified that it would happen that way, that God would take Him home just as I had left. That all my family would be there at his side and I would not. He did not go home then. He fought back, chose life and kept battling.

So many days it hurt that I did not get to pick the timing of things. That I didn't get to be there when I would've chosen. But I did get there. Last July, we spent quiet evenings together enjoying my sister-in-law's kick ass cooking and holding hands and watching So You Think You Can Dance. We had Skype sessions where I laughed at him sipping Red Stripe through a straw and he laughed at me sitting on a tree stump to get good internet reception. In February, we launched our candidacy for the papacy (There is no logical way for me to explain this to anyone who did not know my brother. I can only be sorry for you that you missed out. It was big fun.)

And in March, I headed home to see him again, this time with my whole gang at my side. Our first full night home we went out to dinner. Both my brothers and their families and us. It was glorious and heart wrenching at the same time. I was so happy to meet my sweet niece for the first time, to hold those big brother hands again, to hear my sister-in-law's laugh, to watch my boys giggle maniacally with their cousins, to share quiet conversation with the man who is my first nephew and open my eyes to what a stellar human being he is.

Cousins at dinner

But it ripped me up inside to watch my brother fight for every breath, to see the look of panic in his eyes, and to realize how tired he was. I went back to our guest house that night knowing deep in my soul he was ready to go home soon. And with a panic in my heart. I was there. Then. But I would leave again soon. What if the timing God chose happened to be the one that left me far away in that moment? What if I would have to leave knowing I would never see him again here on earth? And I was angry about the lack of control my life demanded of me.

Cousin Dinner

In the days that followed, my brother entered the hospital and we began to realize that his battle with ALS was drawing to a close. Difficult conversations had to be had. Hard decisions made. A birthday had to be celebrated. And seafood had to be eaten. And a family had to come together to figure out how to live, laugh, love and say goodbye. And do you know what? If God had said to me, "Colleen, I am going to take your brother home and you have no choice in that matter, but all the other details, I will let you plan", even in my eager to plan brain, I could not have come up with a more perfect scenario as we experienced in the days surrounding my brother's going home.

So many of the details are too intimate. Words are great tools to express certain things, and for others, they are cheap. So much of what happened would be cheapened by them in this case. But here is what I would like to share. I do not have a family that has followed a cookie cutter path. We touch every point on the spectrum when it comes to personalities and temperaments, life choices, and religious, spiritual and moral orientations. But I am blessed beyond belief with a family who knows without a doubt how to love fiercely and stand in unity despite those differences. And I believe a large part of our ability to do that was won as we watched my brother live and fight his battle with ALS with that as his only priority -- to love well, to point people to the love of Christ, and to live with unbounded joy.

These apples don't fall far from the trees, y'all
Cousin Shenanigans

So in the moments surrounding his going home, that is what we did. We laughed loud and loved strong and teased relentlessly. We drank too much and ate too much and talked too much (so much so that we were "shushed" by the ICU nurses while we were still outside in the waiting area). We cried and we embraced and we figured out where our strength lay. So that in the moment that Kevin ran into Jesus' arms, we could leave all of our differences behind and stand hand in hand singing. And cheering him on his way. I have no absolutely no words to describe what that moment felt like. It is forever suspended in time for me. The woman my sister-in-law was in that moment has forever changed me. Being the daughter who first lost a child of a mother who now sent her little boy home is the most breakingly beautiful title of womanhood I now carry. Standing in the embrace of my remaining siblings is a moment I will take with me forever. The faces of nephews and nieces and their expressions of love for their father and their uncle and the love shared by our children, the great big band of cousins that make up this family is for me a joy beyond all belief, a hope for a future that shines with radiance. These young people that we raised? They are good, y'all. So, so good. You will thank us one day for our procreative gifts. I promise you.

Celebrating Kevin's birthday in the ICU waiting room the day before we cheered him home to heaven
Me with some of my favorite people on earth, my sister, my niece, and my cousin

I look back on that time and feel overwhelming gratitude to my God. I didn't want my brother to have ALS. I don't want him to be gone. But these are things God does not consult me on. However, I did want to hold his hand and be next to him when that moment arrived. And I was. I did want to feel a tight part of my family circle and share that experience with my mom and my siblings. And I did. I did want to see him one more time outside of the hospital when he was still "well" and I did. I did want to be able to tell him all the reasons I loved him and was so proud of him and I did. I did want to celebrate with joy when at last he had beat the beast and won the crown. And I did. I did want to sing to him the songs that had beat in my heart for him while I was far away and I did. I wanted my sister-in-law to know how deeply beautiful she was and how much I appreciated her. I wanted to say out loud to her that we supported every choice she had made in this difficult journey and we supported her as she began a new phase of life. And we supported her relief that the battle was over. I got to say those words. And I did want to laugh and have a good beer and eat fried stuff from the Gulf and talk in my New Orleans accent. And I did. I wanted a piece of my brother to take with me forever. He left me that. That man, he knew how to live well, and you know what, because of that, he knew how to die well. I know that sounds weird, but anyone who witnessed it would unequivocally agree with me, I know.

Crawfish and beer. It's how we live. It's how we love. It's how we roll.

I didn't really know how to write a to-do list for my brother's death. I didn't want to. But when the moment came, I knew, he knew, we all knew, how to live it. And if I got to pick, this is how it would have been. If I get to write the script for my own going, I want it to be just like his.

And just to keep reminding me that this was just a sweet tender mercy and not to let myself get used to it, God went back to his usual ways and put me back in my place of humble submission, when, on the morning of the funeral, I found myself late and lost and in the midst of an utter panic attack, screaming at my older sister on the phone for help. And then the brunt of the pastor's joke as I walked into the church having scorned my poor family into beaten little pulps in my grief and pain and the anxiety of things being out of my control again. Crying and laughing at myself, and seeing that once again, He had worked it all for good even when He didn't give me a say. And me, back to my sheepish little apologies and promises of greater trust in the future.

And do you know what? I'm pretty sure I could hear that man, my big brother, giggling at me from heaven. And I think he might have been tying my baby's hands to his shoes too. But that, too, is a story for another day.

Family bonfire in my brother Stephen's yard

The Story of a Border Crossing

I thought you were all due for a little comic relief here, and we had a day that was pretty laughable last week. We had headed down to the Caribbean beach town of Puerto Viejo with Greg's dad who was here visiting. He wanted some time to soak up the beach and treat the kids to something nice while he was here.
While we were there, we found out the rates the tour company's were charging to bring folks over to Panama were really low right now as it the low season for tourism here. Looking at the calendar, we realized visa renewal loomed just ahead of us next month and with me having a trip to the States planned at the beginning of the month and our chapel construction under way, it was better to leave now than later. So we booked the trip to leave on Monday morning. The van would be at our hotel to pick us up at 8am.
The first fun was that all of our clothes were really gross from the weekend at the beach and needed washing. We went to the places that were advertised as laundry mats only to find they were actually women who were willing to wash out two loads of laundry for the small sum of $40. So we opted to figure it out on our own. Somehow my husband convinced the boys that standing in the shower in their bathing suits hand washing the clothes was fun. And he convinced me that these clothes would dry enough on the porch of the hotel overnight that we would be able to pack them up in the morning.

(Photos from our trip to the Jaguar Rescue Center in Puerto Viejo)

I scrounged up enough clean clothes for everyone to have something to wear the next morning while the bos worked.  The clothes got washed and hung to dry outside. Somewhere in the middle of the night one of the worst torrential down pours that anyone seems to remember began on the Caribbean coast. It rained almost 16 hours straight. The clothes outside were wetter than they had been when we hung them up. Trying to be a trooper, I gathered them in to a plastic bag and figured we could dry them when we got where we were going. I headed to the room where the clean clothes and suit cases were to get us all ready to go. Only to find it was locked.
And upon further investigation, it turned out the hotel did not have any keys for the door. At this point, we had just minutes to be ready for the bus that would arrive to take us to the border. The boys made do with whatever mish mash of dirty pajamas they were wearing and headed to the lobby to wait for the bus while the Greg and the hotel maintenance man attempted to break into the bedroom. Soon the boys returned announcing that the bus had arrived. I mentally prepared myself to have to journey to Panama in my pajamas as I strapped on my sandals and prayed Memorares to the contrary. Greg went to buy us some time with the bus driver.
Finally, after disassembling the door frame, the man was able to get into the room.  I threw the bag of wet clothes into the suit case and handed it off to Greg while I quickly changed from my pajamas into my most comfy maxi skirt and a t-shirt. The maxi skirt would prove to be a poor choice as the not-so-good, terribly rainy day wore on and the water slowly creeped its way up my cotton skirt from its edges which were all too close to the ground. I was wet from the knees down for most of the day.
Minutes later, we were in the tour bus headed toward to border town of Sixaola. We arrived without incident and exited through Costa Rica immigration with no problems. Then we proceeded toward the bridge which spans the border of Costa Rica and Panama. We were to cross it on foot, pass through Panamanian immigration, and meet the tour bus from the Panama office on the other side. So, in the rain, trailing kids and luggage behind, we stepped out onto the bridge. It is a 103 year old wooden suspension bridge which clearly  has not had much maintenance in the last 80 years or so. There is a brand new bridge being constructed just on the other side of it, but apparently there is some governmental scuffle about whose job is to finish the last portion where the two sides (the Costa Rica side and the Panama side) meet.  The old bridge has gaps between its wooden boards large enough to make a mom's heart beat hard and fast and to complete negate the convenience of luggage with wheels. The rusty grates that provided protection from the edges of the bridge had gaps of their own. We walked slow enough to keep anyone from slipping on the wet wood boards but fast enough to keep anyone from getting interested in what was over the edges of that bridge. We arrived at the other side wet and relieved.

(Photos of the bridge crossing)

The line for Panama immigration was pretty long and we stood there in the rain trying to make the best of it all. We were rewarded for that by meeting the most warm, kind Panamanian immigration officer in the office on the other side. He was so excited to see our big family headed into Panama and to find out that we were missionaries that he waived the entrance tax for all the kids.
We found our van driver, dragged our luggage down the flight of steps that led to the street below the bridge and started on our way through Panama toward the islands of Bocas del Toro, our destination. A short way into our journey, the van driver received a phone call and then turned the van around and pulled into a restaurant parking lot. He informed us that the bridge we needed to cross into the dock town of Almirante was closed at the moment, so we would stop here at the restaurant for a while to see if it would open. I assumed this had something to with the weather.
So wet and getting tired, we savored the chance to sit, eat and sip a few cokes while we waited. The driver beckoned to us that it was time to head out and we headed in to the van. He informed us that the bridge we needed to cross was being blocked by indigenous workers who were protesting not being paid for their work on the banana farms. He would take us to one side, where we cross past the blockade and meet another van that would take us the rest of the way to dock.
We arrived at the foot of the bridge to giant traffic jam that was piling up as people took one taxi to one side, crossed and met another on the other side. Just at the edge of the bridge, under a large blue tarp, peacefully stood one hundred or so protesters. It's so hard as a missionary to just keep going on with life in those moments, to not stop at the sight of such injustice and join the protest. But our kids were wet and tired and getting them to safety was our first priority. We quickly walked past the blockade and met the van on the other side.
Now three hours behind schedule, the van sped around the winding mountain roads toward the dock. This apparently was not an ideal follow up to our unexpected lunch, because just as we arrived at the dock, Brendan showered the entire inside of the van with everything he had consumed. I smiled weakly at the horrified young back packers who had narrowly escaped the shower and attempted to clean us both up with some amount of grace. This was no easy feat as the place we had arrived was a wooden dock which was drenched with rain with bathrooms at either end marked men and women, but behind both of which were just holes in the dock's wooden planks opening into the water below. I found a sink outside and managed to get us slightly cleaned up, but remember, changing clothes was not an option as everything in the suit case was now even wetter than it had been before we left. We waited around the dock avoiding the humiliating glances of our fellow travelers as we had been informed that our boat taxi had been delayed due to weather. The boat finally arrived and we loaded up our luggage and hopped in, putting the motion sick traveler on the outside end.
We crossed the canals of Almirante and headed out into the open Caribbean Sea toward the beautiful islands of Bocas del Toro. We arrived without reservations for our three night stay and with the assumption that in off season it would be easy to find a place to stay. An hour and a half later, both the boys and I were begging Greg to just take any place that had room for us. He was finally able to make a reservation at some cabins on the island just across from Bocas Town and we grabbed some dinner and headed over.
From that point forward, our border crossing trip changed course. Bocas is one of the most beautiful, interesting places I have ever been filled with some of the most interesting people I have ever met. We soaked up every lovely minute there and fell thoroughly in love with the place.

(Photos from our time in Bocas)

When it came time to head home, we crossed the border and made our way back into Costa Rica and then to home without event. This is the crazy, funny, beautiful missionary life we lead. Full of once in a lifetime experiences that make great story telling. And as I often say to my kids, "Who gets to do this? We do! Why? Because we love the Jesus who first loved us!" How awesomely amazing is that?