Westbound and rolling

At long last we are departed - from Oregon I mean. We actually moved out of our house Sept 15, and I said that should really mark the beginning of our trip. But I must admit that it didn't really feel like it until we got on the plane for Honolulu this morning.

Having slightly weird one way tickets, we were singled out for a thorough search at the airport. Keep that in mind. It took about 20 more minutes.

It is very hard to get your stuff pared down to a reasonable amount, especially for such a long and varied itinerary. We are currently schlepping around 4 22 inch tall rolling carry-ons, 4 day packs, including one big enough to hold my computer, and 2 duffels, one large enough to crawl into. Unfortunately it's also large enough to weigh well over the new 50lb weight limit for domestic flights. After a some shuffling on the floor of the Portland airport, we got it down to 70lb and were able to finesse the international flight thing. But it's going to get harder when we're trying to fly on the cheap or into less traveled areas.

The whole idea was for everybody to have one roll-around that could be carried on or checked, depending on how we felt, and one big duffel that held the overflow, stuff we aren't using at the time, and of course the items prohibited on commercial airplanes, but which no sane person would live without. You know, a pocket knife, a fingernail scissors, a chef's knife... Well the overflow overflowed into the emergency duffel and made the main one too heavy for a Boeing 747 to get off the ground, so we shuffled and trimmed and pared. Then we mailed the smaller duffel back home with 25lb of stuff we should have no trouble doing without. Now if I can only get the rest of the family to give up their electric
toothbrushes!