22 days: Suitcase upgrading

August 5 2012
Everywhere I have traveled in the past has been short term or close enough to allow me to hastily cram everything I needed in a blue adidas duffel. That faded old bag has been very adequately loved and is complete with the occasional rips or holes: it has survived countless hours on the softball bus and many nights dragged across a campsite or thrown into the back of the car for the next spur-of-the-moment adventure. My next journey, though, requires something a little more... sophisticated. I'm graduating from a $20 Dunham's adidas duffel to a real-deal, this-is-the-big-leagues, Chap's 29-inch Expandable Spinner Suitcase, complete with funny red fabric and a fancy trolley system. It has resided under my bed befriending dust and lost socks for a couple months, till just recently on a sudden overnight at Grandma's I decided hey, I'm going to test drive my fancy Spain suitcase. That thing is incredible! The number of nooks and crannies they can hide in a rolling rectangle is amazing.

But how do you fit five months of your life into a suitcase? This is my dilemma of the month. I leave in 22 days, now almost 21, and while I've figured out how to compact many articles of clothing and books and pictures and shampoos and notebooks into a small red piece of luggage, there is so much more I want to take that can't be shoved into a suitcase. I want to bring my mom so she can walk along the Mediterranean with the sand in between her shiny red toes, and I want to bring my brothers to keep me laughing on the unbearably long airplane ride. I want to bring my friends the Scannell and Summers families so that they can play tennis on clay courts every day and pretend they're Rafeal Nadal. I want to bring my grandpa so he can make me his special waffles every Sunday morning; and my grandma, because she would love it just like she loves everything. I want to bring Suester so she can continue to help me because I'm sure algebra will be even harder in Spanish.. I want to bring my friends so they can see a new world apart from a small town. I want to bring my mom's best friend Chrissy, because she would absolutely love the art scene, and Mr. McHugh, because we all know he'd get into some pretty crazy things, and my puppy, because he'll be a full grown dude when I get back and I don't want to miss his cuddliness. I want to bring all the people who encouraged me and helped me for the past 9 months (planning out this trip). But unfortunately, you can't all fit in my suitcase, however fancy and upgraded it seems to be.