Travel | Organizing Goddess

Lessons in Packing

I’ve always prided myself on being an efficient packer. (I last wrote about this in Packing Light.) When I travel, I fit everything into a carry-on suitcase, no matter how long I’ll be away. I don’t bring anything “just in case”. Everything gets worn or used by the end of the trip. Those rules were put to the test last week when my husband and I vacated our home for a few days because of the remodeling we have going on….

Read more →

Packing Light

Over the years, I have honed my packing skills so that I don’t bring anything extraneous when I travel. I’m proud that my family and I have traveled internationally — sometimes for multiple weeks — with only one carry-on suitcase per person. I can’t even remember the last time I checked a suitcase. I last wrote about packing light in Simplify Your Packing. In that post, I talked about how I minimized the amount of jewelry I traveled with. But…

Read more →

Change for Good

Have you ever come back from a foreign trip with leftover currency? If you travel abroad frequently, then you might want to keep the currency and bring it on your next trip to that country. However, if you don’t expect to go back to that country in the foreseeable future, you probably want to do something with it so that it doesn’t become clutter. Bills can be exchanged for dollars at banks that handles currency exchange, but they won’t accept…

Read more →

What Price Free?

Tomorrow I’m leaving for Atlanta, Georgia, to spend the rest of the week at the annual conference of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO). This will be my seventh time attending the NAPO conference and I’m excited to come home with new ideas for my clients and my business. What I don’t intend to come home with is hotel freebies. You know, those little bottles and tubes of shampoo and moisturizer, sewing kits, shoe polishers, and shower caps. When I help clients…

Read more →

Packing Up

We took our 18-year old daughter to college a few days ago. It was a huge undertaking – physically, emotionally, and of course, organizationally. As I’ve mentioned before, I deal with emotional upheaval by getting organized. (See Love, Loss, and Organizing). Getting my daughter and all her stuff to school was a logistical puzzle that kept me focused and helped keep the emotions at bay. Before I go on vacation, admiring friends often say to me one or two weeks before, “I bet…

Read more →