Tools, Traveling and Tips

So I'm writing this post while sitting in a motel. We're traveling back home to Alabama because hubby is supposed to preach in a conference later this week. Today's post is going to be a hodgepodge of suggestions and tips for everything from traveling to life.

Your welcome.

Anyway, tip number one is that you should never announce on the internet that you're traveling because you don't want to alert thieves and robbers who are trolling through the internet that your home might be vulnerable. I realize I started today's post with that kind of announcement that we should never make, but if you're a thief who reads this blog in order to know when to break into our house, 1. you need to get a life; 2. you need to get a better target; 3. even though we're gone, these guys are still at the house. Not only will they guard our stuff well, but they also know Krav Maga, and they will leave you hurting if you attempt to enter our house without permission.

Tip number two:  if you play the piano, you may have noticed that your fingers become awfully icy by the time you finish playing for the song service. Especially if you live in Michigan, the temperature is in the single digits and the furnace doesn't kick on early enough to warm up the auditorium. With all the hunters in my family, I've zoned in on one of their tools and now I always carry one of these with me to the piano:

I hold onto it between songs, and it helps keep the feeling in my fingers. They also have toe warmers in case you work in a drafty office in the same building. Just sayin'.

Tip number three:  it's not overpacking. It's called being prepared. I like to have choices in what I wear because I never know how I'm going to feel on any given day. So to be gone for four days means I have to take more than four outfits. And let's face it--if you take only one or two pairs of shoes, you're doing it wrong.

Tip number four: If you plan your traveling right, you can multitask and end up visiting your college kid on the way to your husband's preaching engagement. If you time it really well, you'll hit town at the same time as a snowstorm that cancels classes and work for the day and you'll get to spend the whole day with him! Yay!

Tip number five: it's probably not a good idea to write a blogpost when you've only had three hours of sleep the night before because you were trying to get things finished up so you can leave in the morning. You'll end up falling asleep three times while trying to type, and then you have to go back and re-read what you wrote to make sure you were making sense and not talking gibberish.

With that in mind, I think I'll finish up here so that I can go to sleep properly.

So what about you? Got any tips either for traveling, packing, or just general life?