Stagnant Suitcase Syndrome

We've all suffered from it. There was even an Everybody Loves Raymond episode about it. We enjoy a wonderful trip, we come home and then we leave our suitcases out for weeks until we finally have to unpack. It's a common side effect of traveling. But why?

I myself suffer from it. I've been back from California for over a week, and just finally unpacked. And I can't even blame it on my luggage being lost, because it wasn't.

I think we don't like unpacking because it's unrewarding. There's nothing to look forward to. We're not heading anywhere exotic. We're home. We can finally relax and rest after an exhausting trip, and unpacking is the last thing on our minds. That is until we need something out of our suitcases. And if you're like me, you just dig around for it and leave your suitcases sitting there for another two to three days.

But while unpacking my suitcases yesterday, I kept thinking about how nice it would be to stop living out of my suitcases the minute I got home. Of course, I'm not very disciplined so my method of unpacking would have to be very easy - which is when it hit me. The reason we have trouble unpacking is because we put our suitcases in the wrong spot.

When we come home, we normally put our suitcases in our entrance halls, on our stairs or even worse, in our bedrooms. That means we have to lug our luggage full of dirty clothes all the way back to our laundry rooms, which is normally far from our rooms. So we don't do it. But if we took our luggage straight to our laundry rooms first, and dumped out all of the dirty clothes - even if that's on the floor, then we wouldn't waste a trip and unpacking would be much easier.

So my new travel ritual is the minute I get home to head straight to my laundry room and dump out all of the dirty clothes. It will be therapeutic to get them out after being gone for so long. Then I'll take my suitcase up to my bedroom, dump out the rest of the items on the floor, put the suitcase out in the hall and get in bed. The next morning I'll deal with the piles. After all, half the battle is just getting everything out of the suitcase, and I'll have that part done all before falling asleep.

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