In a few days, the family is heading out on a 6 week long trip to Europe where I am going to tackle a ton of great conferences, customer meetings, and trainings for our internal teams at Dell EMC (for more info on that part of the trip, check out Big Data Beard). The trip is mostly work related with 5 of the 6 weeks of this trip are packed work weeks. However, this is a Go With Daddy trip, so we naturally we do have a nice long week for us…in this case it is in Greece, split between Athens and the island of Corfu.  We are super excited to be in Corfu with some friends from Birmingham where the husband is actually from Corfu and we are going to be in town with them for their baby’s baptism.  A beautiful Greek island in the Mediterranean with some lovely local friends…does it get better?!?  And along the way we will pack each of the weekends in between work weeks with all sorts of fun activities…stay tuned for much more on that shortly. So here’s the challenge:

Pack all the clothes needed for work and play for 6 weeks abroad in one suitcase…and hope it weighs less than 50 lbs.

I am pretty excited for the challenge for one giant, hard plastic reason…my new Pelican Air suitcase.  Oh, and cause it is a six week trip to Europe, but I digress.  I need to get my large-man-sized clothes and shoes to cover work and play all in one bag.  Here is my plan:

Work clothes:

• Sport Coat – super versatile blue tailored fit in a tropical weight
• 4 – dress shirt
• 2 – dress slacks
• 2 – smart denim jeans (my brand is Blue Delta and these can go casual too)
• Brown dress Oxford shoes
• Brown dress belt
• Black casual shoes
• Black belt

Weekend/Vacation Clothes:

• 4 – Eddie Bauer Henley t-shirts (versatile, nicer than a regular t-shirt)
• 3 – lightweight casual shirts
• 2 – khaki shorts
• 1 – lightweight chino
• 2 – swimmers
• 2 – athletic shirts
• 2 – athletic/trekking shorts
• Training shoes (which can double as trekking shoes for adventures)
• Chaco sandals
• Casual fabric belt

General stuff:

• 9 – Under Armour boxer jocks
• 4 – Ex Officio under shirts
• 6 – pairs dress socks
• 6 – pairs athletic socks
• Tolietry bag – I can buy everything abroad except my beard products…so that’s the only thing stocked up in the bag.

There are a few big picture concepts that make this plan work, which I feel necessary to explain:

• Because this is a business trip for the majority of the time, I expect that each week I will have the hotel or a local shop clean my work clothing for me, which is an appropriate business expense.
• For the casual clothes and all the stuff for Millie and the kids, we will have to do laundry roughly once every 10 days.  It is an un-sexy reality of this sort of trip, but we make the best of it…and have some funny stories from doing it in the past, so we embrace it.
• All of my casual clothing and especially my under garments are all pretty easily washed in a sink and hung to dry in the instance that we are not able to make a laundry stop in the time my consumption of clean clothes dictates.

Packing starts tomorrow, so here’s to the the best laid plans!

Cory