I'm Packing to Go to Grandmom's and Taking...

by Dean Kramer
June, 2007

I spent the important years of my adolescence on Cape Cod at a school for “problem children” and I lived with a local family in Wellfleet, a small town on the lower Cape, when school was not in session. In those days the Cape was still rural enough that you could ride a horse on dirt paths from house to house. I loved the time I spent there but school days ended, my foster family moved to Maine, and I couldn’t afford to visit Cape Cod on my own.

Forty years have passed. Last month a friend invited me to spend a week in June at a bayside cottage in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. I’m greatly looking forward to going. There are places and perhaps even some people from the old days I would love to look up. I am not, however, looking forward to packing.

I remember with fondness the days when I could respond to an invitation to travel by throwing a change of underwear and a toothbrush in my backpack and heading out the door.

I can no longer do that. Due to some cognitive issues, organization sometimes defeats me so, on my PDA, I have made a list of all I need to take to Cape Cod. The list grows longer day-by-day. Reading it makes me so tired I consider not going at all. But I really want to go, so I plod ahead with my packing plans.

Naturally I will pack what anyone would—clothing, toiletries, and spending cash.

But age has made additional things necessary and MS has made many more additional things necessary.

These days I need all my underwear and a 60-count package of incontinence products. I need a fishing tackle box filled with supplements, a toiletry bag filled with medications, and a representative selection of mobility devices.

Because I am traveling with a service dog, I also need to pack his crate, food, snacks, supplements, toys, bedding, harness, bowl, water bottle, documentation, and grooming tools.

There is technology to take along. We’ll want the iPod on the 10-hour car trip, and a cell phone. I’ll want my PDA so I can see what I forgot and so I’ll have a fighting chance of remembering to take it all home again. Each of these things has its own charger. Two of them have their own headsets.

I have to take my laptop because, though I’ll be on vacation, there are several important, time-sensitive projects at work about which my employer may need to contact me. Such are the wages of wireless life. I’m hoping the cottage is in a dead cell area.

My friend goes to this cottage each year and she has a routine that mainly consists of sitting on the patio overlooking the harbor and reading. That sounds wonderful to me so I am also taking several books.

We’re driving up in a Subaru wagon. That’s a pretty roomy vehicle, but I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll also need a small tow-behind U-Haul trailer. I have another friend who has just started training as an overland trucker.  Maybe we ought to see about borrowing her rig and semi. She could gain practice transporting us to and from the Cape.

Last week the friend I’m traveling with said she always plans to travel light but seems to end up with way more than she needs. In the past I’ve had the opposite problem. I pack lightly and end up with all my clothes stained by the end of the second day. I pack my idea of the bare essentials and find I have no flexibility. I pack for days at the beach and find myself invited to more formal events.  I feel dorky and inappropriately dressed. 

“This year,” my friend said, “I really AM going to travel light.”

 “Easy for you to say.” I thought grimly and I consulted my PDA to see what else I could possibly need to take along.

Next month I'll tell you how it went.