Wednesday May 19, 2010 - Oconomowoc, Wisconsin

A day of preparation for departure. We enjoyed a picnic lunch at the lakeside 'beach' in Oconomowoc. The kids had fun with that, throwing sticks into the water and playing on a playground in the sand. People were beginning to work on their summer tans. I can't say however, that I was particularly enthralled with the guy who showed up mid-lunch to lay out a few dozen feet from us. Shirtless, and he rolled the legs of his shorts up as far as he could before rolling the waist of his shorts down over the top of his butt-crack. Truly. And I'm trying to eat. Can't you save that sort of extra-enthusiastic sun-bathing for the privacy of your back yard?

Tonight we completed the rearranging of our clothes - again. This time we were packing away our heavy winter clothes. The timing of this trip made it really hard for us to determine what clothes we would need, exactly. We've had pretty cool weather most of the way thus far - but never cold enough to really justify the heavier winter clothes we packed. Now we're beginning to consistently hit temps in the 80's, so it's nice to shift to our lighter summer clothes.

Our basic packing strategy is to keep 4-5 changes of clothes readily available for each of us, doing laundry every three days or so. This way, we only have to lug two bags of clothing out of the van at each of our stops. The rest of the clothes stay packed away in longer term 'storage' - available if and when we need them, but not something we have to lug around on a day-to-day basis. There's pride in being able to wrangle a family of five around with only two bags of clothing plus my work/laptop bag.

So we rearranged everything again, managing to come up with another small bag of clothes to donate (this time to the friends we'll be staying with in Minneapolis). There's a sense of progress in being able to purge little bits of things we no longer need along the way. We find an odd (perhaps) satisfaction in determining what we can do without, what we aren't going to need again - and let go. Pieces of our lives float around this country now in a very literal sense. We hope that others will benefit from them as we have.