Consummate traveler, I am

I'm beginning another series of trips, this time shorter and some actually involving personal travel. But being the end of spring break for my kids and the fact that I am on a plane on Sunday (and this is a work trip), I didn't start packing until 10:30pm the night before my 8 am flight.

I've read some articles in airline magazines (surprise) about experienced travellers and some the tell-tales of newbies. One of the things they mentioned was that experienced travellers never pack early.

Sure, I've got a complete set of toiletries, all under 3 ounces and packed in Ziploc bags, so that part is easy to complete, but my Boy Scout experiences and my military background tell me to pack with a checklist. "Don't forget nothin'" is one of the Army Ranger's founder's mottoes. With a checklist, I don't need to think about what to bring, I've already put my efforts into the checklist!

So, last night, we watched Children of Men (a good movie and even a more interesting family movie - "This is set in 2027, I thought there were supposed to be flying cars?") and didn't finish until late. After the movie, I decided I should pack as I had to leave the house by 6am to get to the airport.

Remember The Milk, my online task list service, which really serves as my brain, unfortunately had some server issues and was down. This is the first time it has ever happened (I understand there were some widespread Internet outages in Australia Texas (see Emily's comment) yesterday) and I was unable to print out my checklist. "No worries," I thought to myself, "I've travelled enough that I should be able to do it all from memory."

So, I think I packed all the right and enough clothes, some stuff to run in the hotel gym and my iPod speakers. Unfortunately, when I got to the off-airport parking, I realized I left my blue tooth headset sitting on my desk. I did bring the charger and the blue tooth dongle I just purchased, but no headset.

I was really looking forward to making the few conference calls I had this week on Skype. I just signed up for Skype and that was the main reason I bought the dongle. Hopefully, the mic on my laptop will work well enough - I was hoping to save the cell phone minutes and make use of a conference hotspot and not have to back to my room. We'll see how it work out.