To me, the hardest part about travel is packing up. My luggage is stored at my parents’ place, my items to be packed are with me, and some of them I’m using right up until the day I leave. Organization is not in the cards with that one. However, in this last trip to Texas, I did things a bit different.

Truth be told, it didn’t make the packing part of things any more organized. I just planned ahead. I took everything I was planning on taking with me and put them in a set of Amazon Packing Cubes. Pants, shirts, socks, everything clothing related that I planned on taking was put in a cube and set aside.

Packing Cubes are a curiosity that I didn’t think would work for me. I found them while perusing eBags.com a while back. They’re these varying sized, fabric, cube-shaped bags that you can put various items in and then kinda Tetris-like pack your luggage. I thought they were kinda redundant, then someone pointed out how messed up their luggage got when it went through TSA. It got me thinking, “Huh… I sometimes put small items in my luggage. What’s stopping those items from falling out and being lost forever in the TSA bag check?”

The Cubes worked better than I could have imagined. The five days I spent in Texas wasn’t spent living out of an explosion that was my suitcase. I was able to move the Cubes straight from my suitcase to the hotel drawers and everything was already separated. The idea is you can see your stuff through the meshing of the cube, but since I bought black Cubes and have black clothing, it was a little bit more difficult. Still, it was nice I could open a cube, grab an item, and just move on.

All in all, the switch to using Packing Cubes was one of the best moves I’ve made since I started traveling more. When I was in Texas last year, I was able to stay at my best friend’s but the need to rummage through a huge suitcase to find anything was frustrating. I wish I had these Cubes then, but I’m glad I have them now.