Packing List - Ten lbs of stuff in a Five lbs Bag

I always equate the start of the moving process to the opening kickoff in a football game.  The whole thing is theoretical, just a pile of expectations, until you’re running down the field and BAM!, you’re looking out the earhole of your helmet.  Up to this point, the move has been a philosophical exercise wrapped in assumption.  Fact:  Today I dropped off our Toyota RAV4 in St. Louis with American Auto Transport, which is the contractor that ships personal vehicles for military and other government employees.  The move is now firmly planted in the land of reality.  This certainly lights a fire under all the tasks we need to accomplish in the next two weeks.  Only six days until they are boxing up our things.

Sitting in the Lambert – St. Louis International Airport without Wifi (you have to pay to play here in the St. Louis airport), I have some overdue quiet time to reflect on our plan and start pairing what we need to take with how we’ll take it.  Starting broad, four main categories define the “things” we will take on the trip as opposed to shipping with a moving company.  Movers will ship the majority of our stuff, but we will have to pack several things ourselves.  The list of items that we will take with us is broken into four logical categories including 1) things needed for our vacation, 2) belongings we’ll need between when we move into our house on Fort Wainwright and when the movers come, 3) required items to complete the flight, and 4) miscellaneous things that the moving company won’t move.  The overall purpose for preparing this section is to help us organize what we need to separate before the movers pack it.  If it is helpful or entertaining for you as the reader, then bonus!

There are only three means for taking needed items with us.  They can either go in the airplane, in the car, or by mail.  Each method has its limitations, which forms the overall limits to how much we can bring.  The car, a 2007 Toyota Camry Hybrid, is limited by space.  With four seats filled, the car will be constrained primarily by trunk space.  The cost of mailing is limiting or even prohibitive making it a last resort.  A couple, single-use items are candidates for shipping such as my dress uniform, our dress clothes from Paige’s graduation, and uniforms that I’ll need when we arrive.  The airplane has a good deal of space, but is limited by weight.  We’ll revisit those limitations after forming our initial packing list.

One of the more obvious packing list categories is all the clothes and personal items that a family would typically take on vacation.  Essentially, we will be on vacation for about a month.  Some specific things to consider are:

-        Summer clothes for Kansas and Florida

-        Bathing suits

-        A dress outfit for Paige’s graduation

-        My dress uniform for the graduation in Kansas

-        Comfortable clothing for Alaska (little heavier than the Florida clothes to account for the cool nights)

-        My uniforms to start back to work on Fort Wainwright (This includes uniforms, limited field gear, and my flight helmet)

-        Work clothes for Liz when she starts her job at BLM on 1 July (granted, she’s going to work as an environmental health and safety expert with the Bureau of Land Management.  She’s gonna be in a granola faction of an earthy-crunchy organization.  I suspect Keen sandals will be a mandatory dress code item.  For those not familiar,  Keens are to the post 2010 earthy-crunchy community what Crocs were to the 2000s, Birkenstocks to the 90’s, and Tevas to the 80’s.  However, I digress.)

-        Toiletries

-        Medicines

-        Hair stuff for the girls

-        Diapers

-        Wipes

It’s important to digress again for a second and explain how our household goods move will work.  Our belongings will get loaded on the mover’s truck on 29 June.  Because we won’t have an address designated on Fort Wainwright until we arrive, our goods will be shipped to Fairbanks and placed in temporary storage.  Additionally, our goods probably won’t reach Fairbanks until after we arrive in late June.  Once the shipment does arrive, we will still have to wait for a local mover to deliver the crates to our house.  The lag between our arrival and our household good delivery could extend as long as two months.  That’s two months on air mattresses.  That’s us enjoying the summer until late August with whatever we can bring with us.  That really stresses packing enough socks and underwear!

A couple boxes/bags of the following items will help us sustain until our property arrives:

-        Air mattresses (Liz and I have a queen mattress, and each of the kids has their own in kids size)

-        Air mattress pump

-        Pillows

-        Linen

-        Declan’s kid tent/mattress

-        Towels

-        A kitchen box with essentials

-        Measuring cup

-        Can opener

-        Small bowls

-        Wok type pot with lid

-        Camping flatware

-        Plates

-        A sharp knife

-        Small cutting board

-        Kitchen shears

-        Ziplocs

-        A couple of Tupperware’s

The flight and drive to Alaska comes with several distinct requirements.  Among the items required for the flight are survival equipment, maintenance items and tools, and flight publications.  The challenge with carrying all the necessary items in the airplane is weight.  5XV has an empty weight of 2074 lbs.  This is the weight of the airplane and all the permanently installed equipment.  This does not include fuel, oil, people, and baggage.  The maximum allowable weight, called the maximum gross weight, is 3,600 lbs.  After filling up with 88 gallons of 100LL fuel and packing three adults and one pip-squeak in, we will have 366 lbs. remaining.  Removing one of the third row seats will gain us 11 lbs. and space farther forward in the cabin.  This is significantly more weight than most small airplanes could handle, but we will probably still run up against this constraint if we’re not careful.

Alaska’s state regulation, AS 02.35.110 lists several items of survival equipment that small airplanes must carry.  The list includes:

-        Rations for each occupant for one week        (A butt load of Mountain House meals)

-        An axe or hatchet                                                (check)

-        First aid kit                                                            (check)

-        Fishing tackle                                                       (check)

-        Knife                                                                      (check)

-        Fire Starter                                                           (check)

-        Mosquito head net per occupant                    (only have two, need more)

-        Two signaling devices                                        (road flares and laser signaling device)

Although not mandatory, I will take several spare parts, service items, and tools with me.  I change the airplane’s oil every 25 hours of operation.  Crunching the numbers, this means that I’ll have to change the oil on the fuel stop between Grimes Field in Ohio and International Peace Garden.  This process takes a couple hours and I can carry everything I need in a 5-gallon bucket.  The items that make up my oil change kit are listed below:

-        5-Gallon bucket

-        Flathead for the cowling

-        My specially cut half bucket to catch oil from the filter

-        Champion CH48109-1 oil filter

-        1” socket

-        1” socket handle

-        Oil filter cutting tool

-        Razor to cut the filter element out of its assembly

-        Magnet (just in case)

-        Zip Lock for the filter

-        Safety wire

-        Safety wire pliers

-        Tubing to drain oil

-        Blackstone oil sample kit

-        Funnel

-        Shop towels

-        Prepared label for the write-up

There are several flight planning and navigation tools that I need to conduct the flight across the U.S. and Canada.  Electronic charts and aviation planning publications on the iPad sure does cut down the list (and weight) of paper that I’ve got to carry.  Running Foreflight on the ipad with a Second Generation Stratus ADS-B receiver provides me a pseudo moving map display with weather along much of the U.S. portion of the route.  Canadian charts for flying VFR (outside the clouds) are not yet digitized, so I’ll have to tear those off the walls and pack them in the plane.  The following list lays out all the things I’ll need for the flight:

-        iPad

-        iPad charger (AC and DC)

-        Stratus receiver

-        Headsets (Two Bose X and the Davie Clark head vices.  I wish they rented Bose/Lightspeed headsets.)

-        Canadian visual flight rules (VFR) navigation charts (VNCs)

-        Canadian supplement

-        Alaska supplement

-        Alaska charts

-        Special trucker’s cap (you gotta look right to perform right)

The last packing list group specifically needed to accomplish the drive/flight, and arguably the most important, is the bag of things that the kids need to pass the time.  You can only entertain a four year old with mountain scenery for so long.   This list certainly isn’t exhaustive and grows at the whim of said four year old:

-        DVD players

-        DVD cases stocked with DVDs

-        Books

-        Workbooks (coloring, maze, etc.)

-        Ziplocs (for the occasional motion sickness)

-        Wipes (see above)

-        Small pillows

-        Snacks

Lastly, there are things that we must take because the movers aren’t allowed to or it would just be smarter for us to take.  An example of items the movers won’t take includes chemicals, perishable foods, candles, and batteries.  It is obviously smarter to take items like important papers, medical records, the airplane logbooks, my flight records, computer, and cameras than to send them with the movers. 

So, we established a plan that we won’t stick to and a packing list that we don’t have room to pack.  Sounds like things are coming together.  The challenge is that everything so far is relatively easy compared to the actual muscle movement necessary to separate these items before the movers start packing on Thursday.  Oh, yeah.  I almost forgot that our time will be split between putting together this list of items, finishing school work, completing the airplane annual, Liz’s last week of work, and Brayden’s last week of school.   More to follow later this week as the movers complete packing and we head out to Gaston’s for the OK18 supercub.org fly-in for the Memorial Day weekend.