Packed

Packing is such an ordeal.  Even with weeks to prepare, the final day is a lot of work.  Actually, it's not the act of putting items in a bag that is so hard. It's all the mind-racking and list checking to make sure you've got it all.  Amber actually did a lot of prep-work for the last several days, getting all the donations arranged into the 4 big bags, and making sure we have all the baby supplies.  I can't tell you how many times we've weighed each bag with one of those handy bag scales.  Each of our four bags is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50.3 lbs each.  We figure as long as we can round down to the nearest pound we should meet the 50 lb per bag limit, right?!  It's an ugly obsession.  

What's uglier is the tighter restrictions on baggage that all airlines have imposed.  Emirates (our airline) only allows ONE carry-on.  By carry-on they don't mean what most of us think of, one of those smallish suitcases that you can get enough stuff into for a weekend.  No, this is more like a messenger bag's worth.  Oh, and it can't weigh more that 15 lbs.  Let's see here, my notebook weighs about 7 lbs, so I'm halfway there just with that.  I initially figured that Emirates probably won't actually weigh my carry on, right?  Well, other travelers we've heard from say that they actually DO weigh it.  I will be that guy walking to the gate wearing extra clothing, jackets, electronics, headphones, neck pillow, etc. just to circumvent the carry-on weight restrictions.  It's all about getting as many donations to Ethiopia as possible!
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Bryan