Packing tips for toothless appliance shoppers

Seven months into my life without Ron, I am grateful for the random memories our condo offers. In the weeks leading up to my trip this past spring, I found that heartbreaking note from Ron and I carry it with me still. In the weeks leading up to this next trip, I found another note from Ron.

It reads like this:

Ideas – Shoes 9 – Chickens

I find it kind of funny that, after two decades together, this was the list that Ron was able to sort out – and apparently he was quite satisfied with his diligent work assessing the things that interest me in life because it was never supplemented – footwear and poultry. I received many size 9 shoes but never – not once – did I receive any kind of a live chicken or a chicken-type item and now I really wish I could see what he envisioned when he made that 50% of our relationship gift planning.

This is a convoluted trip – the product of booking and cancelling, rebooking and then re-rebooking. My phone, which dutifully stores each hotel reservation onto a calendar system – without my consent – believes I am staying in 6 different Paris hotels, as that is apparently the number of times I have changed my mind:

My path looks like this: London, Normandy and Loire Valley on a Gate 1 bus tour, Paris, Basel, and then over to Munich to catch a Rick Steves tour, which will leave me off in Vienna:

I cannot defend the logic of this routing. I only finalized this trip two weeks ago – the result of my inability to figure out what I want to do. You psychology/mental health type readers will likely draw parallel conclusions about not knowing where to go on this trip and not knowing where to go in this life without Ron and I will not argue with you.

At any rate, given my extreme travel experience, I have been able to streamline the pre-departure process, which I’ll share below. There are key financial and timing considerations at work when leaving for 35 days.

First: as I am gearing up to go, I eat a Tootsie Roll while volunteering at a legal clinic (note: any type of volunteering will work if you do not have a law degree). I break off my entire tooth while chewing (any Tootsie Roll flavor will work for this!) and spend the next day getting an emergency dental procedure and not packing.

My dental procedure was a “financial consideration” of $1900, which is ironic since I only ate the Tootsie Roll because it was free.

Second: once home from the dentist, I ice my cheek, but do not investigate why the ice container seems pretty watery. Because I am an experienced attorney, it took me only 48 hours to realize that the refrigerator was not working, and so every perishable food item I own had to be thrown away and I needed to go appliance shopping.

(Note: trying to save myself some time (foreshadowing!) dealing with large appliance installation, I went ahead and also replaced the wall oven, which broke when I was busy with the 2025 chemo cycles/insurance appeals.)

Travel packing math: $1900 tooth + $2500 fridge + $2000 oven + $500 food.

I assume you all think that the purchase of two matching GE appliances from a single company would result in a single delivery, but I feel like that just shows how little you know about travel packing and finances:

• Each appliance must be delivered on a separate day.
• Each delivery has a 4-hour window.
• Each appliance must arrive broken or too large for its space.
• Each appliance must be re-delivered on another day with another 4-hour window.
• No appliance can arrive on the same day as any other appliance.

Travel appliance delivery/packing math – 16 hours of wasted time.

Pause for actual trip details: Most of this trip is solo. I’ve got 4 days with Kris and Jim in Paris, my most loyal travel partners, and a day with my college friend, Pam, also in Paris. But beyond that I’ll be alone, covering a wide range of sites.

I’ve got tickets to three plays (or half-plays if they’re boring!) in London (The Lion King, The Play that Goes Wrong, and Hadestown), I’m doing a romantic private threesome Seine river cruise with Kris and Jim, stopping in Switzerland to see a cool design museum, finally getting up to Normandy for D-day landing sites, seeing a few castles, a lot of stained glass, and spending awhile in Vienna to see some art and an aquarium they built into a WW2 flak tower.

I forgot about one of my other travel skills – poor timing choices for city festivals. If there’s a marathon/concert/massive public holiday in a city, that will be the day I am arriving.

For this trip, I am arriving in Munich on the second day of Oktoberfest (the largest beer festival in the world!), which brings an additional seven million people to the city. (Compare to my arrival in Malaga during Semana Santa earlier this year – merely five million visitors…so Munich is only an additional two million people, which is nothing, really):

The Malaga five million were there under the guise of Easter/religion/resurrection, but holy cow they drank a lot. The Munich seven million are more forthcoming and have the unified and non-Easter goal of drinking huge amounts of beer from 34 ounce Oktoberfest steins:

I change my mind about blogging anymore on an hourly basis. Out of respect for other grieving people out there, it feels disingenuous to simply portray my life as a grand adventure when the reality is sometimes much bleaker than that. I’ve learned the craft of stepping into the flow of the world – smiling, listening, engaging – but the weight of Ron’s absence sits on the outskirts of it all – and I return to the heartbreak of it each time a carefully planned social activity is over.

And I tell you this not to make you sad but to make sure that no one out there grieving…their spouse, their child, their friend…wonders if this dual life is okay. It has to be okay – it’s the most I can muster. I am okay and I am not okay, which I think must be common, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

I’ll be back with you in a few days from London and, because I still have not packed, I leave you with a picture of my new refrigerator instead of my standard luggage picture.