Toronto - how I got it all packed

The view from room 3110, the Toronto Hilton

We're back!  And Toronto was wonderful - what a great, vibrant, busy, diverse city.  We will definitely go back, and I have much more to share with you about this trip.

But I received a lot of questions about how I packed - so I've got snapshots of the process!

The bag - empty.  Those are my ghastly workout shoes next to the bag, so you can see how small the bag actually is.  This is the Tumi Riggs carry-on - no wheels.  I didn't even realized that they MADE one with wheels...  Maybe Tumi should give me one of those, eh?

There's about 30% of my packing capacity already -  my shoes "bumpered" on the sides of my bag, and my pajamas rolled up and slid in between the shoes.  Since these shoes are pretty rigid, I stuffed them full of socks and underwear.  If they had been a bit squishier, I would have just smashed the uppers down pretty flat.

The inside of shoes is a great place to pack the charger for your cell phone...

Unlike a more normal vacation, this one required jeans and a rugby jersey, both of which are quite bulky, but happily almost impossible to wrinkle. So I folded them both snugly, and tucked them into the bottom of my bag, next to my athletic shoes.  The bottom layer of my tote is now more or less flat, and completely full.

The rest of my clothes were just a wee bitty stack of folded garments - compared to the jeans and jersey, EVERYTHING else I took was indeed a smaller parcel.  These garments, once I carefully folded them, sat right into the top of my bag.

The scarf on top is one of those crinkly silk guys that you just twist and twist and twist and twist....  no worries about it getting wrinkled.  And I think you can see that I've got quite a bit of space still in the top of my bag, so when we decide on the return trip that we don't need to wear our jackets, I could easily pack mine and not have to worry about carrying it.

The bag on the right is 10 years old - it's what I carry for a briefcase.  It was originally designed to be a diaper bag (no, I don't have children), but the straps are the perfect length to carry either over the shoulder or at my side, the little side pocket (you can see it's unzipped here) is perfect for passport and boarding passes, and the elastic "bottle pockets" on each end of the bag are a handy place to stash my fan, or a bottle of water, or my watch and bracelets when I'm going through security...

Was I happy with what I packed?  Not entirely. The weather was a little bit warmer than the weather forecasts and promised, so I did buy a FABULOUS tee shirt (more on the shopping later!) which I wore rather than my sheer linen sweater, when we went out to dinner the last evening we were there.  Overall, I think I should have trusted my instincts about how warm it would be, rather than believing the weather prognosticators...

But was I happy?  Oh, yes.  Absolutely.  Positively.  Completely.  

More about Toronto soon...

And a question - I have a real longing to put together some outfits with a painting as the reference point - the "Start With Art" that I've done in the past.  What's your favorite painting?