I always think that I don’t pack right. I forget things, I take too many things or stuff I don’t use (this time I did use the gorilla pod!) … so here are a couple of lists of mispacked things:
Here’s my Top 5 “Forgotten Things”
- Lonely Planet Guide. We only had a single small “outdoor” guide for the ring road. It was okay but we missed the wealth of information provided by the Lonely Planet guides.
- Music. Of course we brought mp3 players but the car radio only took CDs. We got pretty sick of listening over and over to “Best of Björk” which I had bought at the beginning of the vacation. Radio wasn’t so good either. We had long stretches of road with lots of noise and Island radio seemed to have a lot of talking – in Islandic! – and little music. Strangely it got better when we got closer to Reykjavik again.
- Hiking Boots. Actually I don’t even own any. For most hikes it wasn’t that relevant but on our hike to Glymur I would have felt much better (and safer) wearing other shoes …
- Thermos Flask. It is not quite so warm over here, temperature was often around 4°C, and I should have brought more warm clothing (again), maybe some Whisky and of course most importantly a way to keep hot drinks with us.
- Knife or peeler. How dumb is it to not even have a knife with us?
Honorable Mention: Car charger for the N810. Since we use the Nokia to create GPS tracks from our driving and it sucks the battery empty in no time it would have been a good idea to have the car charger with us. Maybe a card game would have been nice as well we usually bring at least one small 2 player game.
And the Top 5 “Things that could have stayed at home”
- Skirt. I really did not need it. 90% of the time the temperature was too low and the rest of the time I still did not need it.
- The second, third and fourth T-Shirt. See #1.
- The 50mm lense. I only used it once I think and that wasn’t necessary
- Makeup. *oops* so yeah that was simply in the bag with the shampoo etc. Still …
- Additional SD and Compact Flash cards for the cameras, I downloaded all the pictures to the laptop every night anyway
I am getting better at not packing too much. And I really needed all 3 pairs of shoes that I had with me.