Whether your're packing for an international trip where you'll fly across oceans or for a backpacking trip where you'll hike over mountains, space-saving packing techniques can be useful to just above everyone - including RV travelers. I recently returned from a trip to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia where I led a troop of 14-year-old Girl Scouts on a tent camping outing for a week. There were four girls and two adults. We had a cooler, two tents, a small propane tabletop stove, and the rest of our gear. We were in one Honda Pilot and space was at an absolute premium - the kind of premium where you forgo a pillow because a hooded sweatshirt can be almost just as comfy to lay your head on, but you can't wear the pillow when it's chilly, so you make sacrifices. Each girl could bring her gear in one backpack, and her compressed sleeping back and camping mat were packed separately into the rooftop cargo carrier. But really? A WEEK'S worth of clothes in one pack? and like, with a toothbrush, shampoo, towel, and all that other stuff too? Yes, and here's how we did it! I give you, the skivy roll.
You take your shirt, socks, (bras for girls), and underwear and roll it like this. You can include shorts if they're lightweight and roll-able, but I kept mine separate. I tend to wear my shorts two times instead of one time like shirts - so I pack less shorts than shirts. This really cuts down on space in your pack and makes it easy to find your clothes for the day and not have to worry about missing socks, etc. Here's my son's version for Boy Scout Camp where they have to wear a specific colored shirt each day:
Especially for young boys who are on their own for a week, this made things so much easier for my son to keep track of his daily outfits. Other space saving tricks we tried out this year were camping towels - like a chamois cloth. They were awesome and worked very well, dried fast, and take up almost no space at all. We also tried out toothbrushes that store toothpaste inside the handle and you just twist the base of the handle on the toothbrush to make paste come out the head. These were a cool idea, but a big fail because both of them we tried to use broke - thankfully they made it until the last day of the trip and we made it home without having to stop and buy another toothbrush!
We also used camping mats and sleeping bags that had compression sacks that we could cinch down quite small. None of this is new to the hardcore backpackers out there, but for those used to RV camping or tourist travelling, some of these ideas might be new. For hotel travel, I've learned to pare down my make up bag and thank goodness nearly every hotel has hair dryers. For the tent camping crowd, standing with your head under a bathroom hand-dryer really sucks when you're just trying not to go to bed with wet hair, but you do what you gotta do - although those chamois camp towels really did dry our hair very well!
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