In our recent trip, Linda and I had a number of discussions about how to organize and optimize what little space we have in the truck camper. We identified a few problems I think are common to truck camping:
- We were wrong about the weather. It was both warmer and colder than we thought it would be.
- Over time, as we pulled clothes off the shelves to wear and as we put clothes back on the shelves after doing laundry, the clothes became disorganized and it became harder to find the clothes I wanted to wear.
- We didn’t really bring eight days worth of clothes with us.
In my clothes storage space, I had clothes for eight days assuming ideal conditions. I stowed:
- 8 underwear
- 8 t-shirts
- 8 white socks
- 3 heavy wool socks (needed 8)
- 4 blue jeans (needed 8)
- 4 cargo shorts (needed 8)
- 3 flannel shirts (needed 8)
- 3 polo shirts
- 1 heavy sweat shirt
- 1 light sweat shirt
- 1 jacket
- 1 rain shell (AKA wind breaker)
I left the house with t-shirt, white socks and cargo shorts on.
On a long trip, assuming ideal conditions isn’t such a great strategy. Bringing more clothes by itself can solve the “not enough clothes” problem but it makes the “can’t find the right clothes” problem worse.
After our big trip, we went to the Container Store in San Antonio to buy another drawer to put in the cabinet/bunk area above the dinette. I don’t think anyone can go into a container store without buying more than they came for and we are no exception. I ran across a display showing these clothes packing cubes. I had never seen these packing cubes before. Linda, who has done lots of air travel, had mentioned these before. She said lots of people use them to stuff more stuff into their suitcases. I instantly recognized them and called her over to confirm. These were indeed what many travelers use to organize and compress their travel stuff. We bought several medium size cubes.
When we got home, I stuffed them with my clothes to see how they might work.
Remembering that the Container Store had small cubes (labeled CUBE S), I thought there might be larger cubes available. I looked on Amazon. I found Eagle Creek Pack It Double Cube , Black, Large and we bought 3 blue (for Linda) and 3 black. They arrived a few days later and I immediately packed jeans into a large cube.
We took all of the cubes (medium and large sizes) to the truck camper and tried putting them into the cabinets we use for clothes. Linda uses cabinet 7 and I use cabinet 15.
Unfortunately, the large cubes don’t fit into the cabinets at the head of the bed. All isn’t lost as the large cubes can be used when we fly places. The medium cubes fit nicely but we can’t get as many of them into the storage space as we wanted. The storage space is narrower at the top and wider deeper at the bottom because of the curvature of the front over the truck cab camper shape.
All in all, I’m pleased with the cubes and plan to use them to organize all my clothes except jeans and heavy sweatshirts.
Hope to see you on the road ahead!