Shared in my last post, Can Math Solve The Packing Problem?, is the 4x4x4(ish) capsule wardrobe I put together for a recent 15-day road trip. On paper, the math was mathing, and the plan looked promising.
I’d have clothes appropriate for the weather, plenty of possible OOTD combinations, and more than enough variety to avoid feeling like I was wearing the same thing over and over. But packing math is one thing. Living out of a suitcase for two weeks is another.
So, did I pack too much?
That question was already rattling around in my head before we left, thanks in part to a very funny article published in my latest AAA Westways magazine called Confessions of an Overpacker. The author makes a pretty convincing case for arriving prepared for almost anything, even if doing so means bringing considerably more than the bare minimum. I could relate. No one wants to be caught short.
I have never been interested in proving that I can survive a two-week trip with three shirts, two pairs of pants, and a heroic commitment to hotel laundry rooms. The goal of my packing math experiment wasn’t to bring as little as humanly possible. It was to pack enough, without hauling along a carload full of clothes I wouldn’t need or even wear.
How Well Did The Math Work?
By all measures, surprisingly good.
Aside from the outfit I’d designated for golf, I easily created different looks with the capsule on each of the other days of the trip. Every one of the 13 pieces was worn at least twice, and most were worn three or more times. All four bottoms were worn three or four times. The five tops were worn two or three times each. Even the four lightweight layers all made multiple appearances.
Better yet, I never repeated an entire outfit combination. Even the top-and-bottom pairings were different every day. Of those 20 possible pairings (5 tops x 4 bottoms), I wore 14 of them, which meant I still came home having never tried six possible combinations. 🤔
That was exactly what I’d hoped would happen. One of my other rules, however, didn’t survive past Day 1 as I wore the same pants two days in a row. We would be driving for over 12 hours on our first day out, and for our overnight stop I intentionally used a weekender bag packed with just what I would need for that night and left my larger suitcase in the car. With another long drive in front of us the next day, I saw no reason to introduce a new pair of pants to Day 2.
So much for rules.
Still, the capsule gave me enough variety that repeating individual pieces two or three days later never felt, well, repetitive. Every top was paired with at least two different bottoms, and every bottom was paired with at least three different tops. I even managed some extreme pattern mixing along the way, which probably deserves either bonus points or perhaps a warning label.
Other than the first two days and the golf day, I hadn’t planned my OOTDs ahead of time. By Day 10, though, I got a little nervous that I might inadvertently repeat an outfit or top/bottom pairing, so I figured out my OOTDs for the remaining five days and took photos of each one for future reference.
I did make a couple of changes to the layering pieces afterward, but not enough to warrant another round of photos.
That little bit of advance planning also changed how I packed. I used my weekender bag to hold the laundry that had accumulated up to then, which freed up space in my suitcase. Then I packed the remaining outfits in reverse order of when I planned to wear them, with the last outfit going in first and the next one I’d need sitting on top.
Not exactly revolutionary, but it made getting dressed and repacking each morning noticeably easier.
The numbers alone make a pretty good case that I didn’t overpack. There wasn’t a forgotten top buried at the bottom of my suitcase or a pair of pants that made the entire trip without seeing daylight.
Could I have packed less?
Absolutely.
I could have brought fewer clothes and planned another laundry stop somewhere along the way. But I didn’t want to spend vacation time doing laundry. We knew we’d be able to wash clothes while staying near our daughter, and made our wardrobe plans accordingly. From there, I packed to comfortably cover the nine days between that laundry stop and getting home.
That included three sets of sleepwear, which also worked out just fine.
And then there was the underwear.
If TikTok is to be believed, figuring out how many pairs of underwear to pack requires its own branch of mathematics. One pair for every day, plus extras, plus extras for the extras, plus apparently enough to handle several highly improbable emergencies.
I came home with three clean pairs. I consider that a success.
The one category where I will admit to some wishful thinking was workout clothes. I brought one set because surely, sometime during a 15-day trip, I would work out. Or go on a cardio walk. Nope, I did not. Not once. In fact, I hardly thought about it.
Apparently Travel Me had reviewed the itinerary and declined the invitation.
The sneakers packed with those clothes, however, were not wasted space. I knew when I packed them that they could also serve as backup shoes if we encountered rain or ended up walking somewhere sandals weren’t practical. I wore them several times, and was happy to have had them with me.
When Good Shoes Go Bad
That brings me to something I left out of the first post entirely: shoes. And, as anyone who has ever tried to close a suitcase knows, shoes have a way of changing the packing equation very quickly.
The three pairs I packed specifically to wear with the capsule were all sandals: silver, white and brown. The white and brown pairs worked out beautifully and got plenty of wear. Both were comfortable, went with just about all of the outfits, and performed as expected.
The silver pair, as fun and flashy as they may appear, had to be put down. Literally, as well as figuratively.
I’d worn them many, many times at home without giving them much thought, but something about the way they affected my gait during this trip, or perhaps it was simply their weight, left me with fatigue and significant pain in my right groin after walking in them for any length of time. Once that became apparent on the trip, there wasn’t much point in continuing to wear them. Cute shoes are one thing. Limping through a road trip is another.
So technically, I brought a pair of shoes I didn’t end up using as much as I could have. But I wouldn’t call that overpacking so much as learning that a pair I thought was travel-worthy no longer was. Fortunately, the sneakers I’d packed with my unused workout clothes turned out to be much more useful. I wore them several times when sandals weren’t the best choice, making them one of those “just in case” items that actually justified the space they took up.
The Verdict
By this point, the answer to whether I could have packed less is pretty obvious. Of course I could have.
I could have brought fewer clothes, squeezed in another laundry stop, and pared things down even further. I could have skipped the workout clothes entirely. In hindsight, that would have been an easy cut. But would packing less have made the trip any better? I don’t think so.
Looking back, I didn’t bring much that I think was truly unnecessary. The capsule pieces were worn repeatedly, the sleepwear comfortably covered the stretch between laundry days, the extra underwear gave me a little breathing room, and the sneakers proved useful even though the workout clothes attached to them never did. The silver sandals were the one item that didn’t work out as planned, but that was something I learned by wearing them, not something I could have known from looking at them in the closet.
So while I may not have packed the smallest possible wardrobe, I also didn’t spend 15 days hauling around a collection of clothes that never saw daylight. In this equation, that distinction matters.
Packing minimally and packing appropriately aren’t necessarily the same thing. For me, the goal wasn’t to see how little I could get away with bringing. It was to have enough variety, enough flexibility and enough clean clothes to enjoy the trip without having to think too much about any of it once we were on the road.
By that measure, I’d call the experiment a success.
Did I pack too much? I don’t think I did.
Could I have packed less? Sure, but I didn’t need to.
Of course, whether I packed too many clothes is not quite the same question as whether we brought too much stuff. But that’s a story for another blog post. Stay tuned.
Tell me, where do you draw the line between packing enough and packing too much?
Stay well and let’s keep in touch! Subscribe, follow, friend, pin … all options are available. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
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Photo credit: MMPerez
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1 Comment
That definitely sounds like a success to me too!