What's on Your Travel Unpacking List?

Let it go.

With spring and summer trips coming up, many of us are thinking about what to pack. I’ll be departing in a few days for a short trip to Oaxaca, Mexico with my sister and her family. This time, instead of thinking too much about what to pack, I’m planning my Travel Unpacking List.

“Your deep self lies under the sometimes stifling layers of external and internal routines, expectation, demands, distractions, and habits. Travel provides a unique opportunity to peel back those layers and let your deep self surface, to rediscover who you are, freed from those patterns.”* I’ve been thinking a lot about how this can still be done while traveling with your family. And one of the coolest tips I learned from the Transformational Travel Council is the concept of an Unpacking List. 

A Travel Unpacking List is the things that you want to leave behind when you travel- the habits that anchor you, the roles that define you, your worries, the layers of yourself that you have built up through your life and that may now come to define, and sometimes restrict you.

Travel can help us move between who we are, who we are seen as, and who we want to be. Leaving behind the parts of ourselves that define us at home is one way to experience this growth.

Here’s my Unpacking List for the upcoming trip:

1. My role as the eldest sister. I too easily fall into the eldest sister role–the one who thinks she knows what is best for everyone and takes control of every situation– when I am around my younger sister. How might the family dynamics change when this is let go?

2. My role as the planner. Naturally, I’m always the one planning every family trip. But this time, I’m a guest on their family trip. I am going to resist and not plan anything, and see how that feels. 

3. My insecurities speaking Spanish. I know that I speak Spanish at a level that I can be understood at, but I clam up and get self-conscious about it. For this trip, I’m going to leave those insecurities behind and dive into speaking Spanish the best I can.

4. My fears of driving on windy mountain roads. Traffic accidents are my top fear, amplified greatly by windy mountain roads in countries with no guard rail and roads in bad conditions. But I’ve come to realize that most of this is irrational, except in extreme circumstances. So I’m going to go into our mountain road trip only noticing the beauty, with all the worries left behind in Chicago.

5. My feelings of responsibility to my home and kids. This is the first international trip I have taken without my kids. And I plan to be fully present in Mexico without having to needlessly check in at home. I trust that they will wake up, get to and from school, and manage their daily lives. That someone will move the car on alternate street parking days and clean the bathroom without me reminding them.

I’m eager to see how doing this will change my experience traveling. The next time you travel, try making your Unpacking List. It can be a mental list, on paper, on your phone, or whatever works for you. It might be the same list, or different, for different trips. And if you’re interested, you can purchase your own Transformational Travel Journal.

*Rupp, Eric. The Transformational Travel Journal, p31. The Transformational Travel Council, 2020.