Packing Light Part Deux

So my last article about this subject dealt with us trying to squeeze everything in a couple of small pieces of luggage.  It compared what Rick Steve's recommends and pitting against our own ambitions.  Now that we are leaving tomorrow back home I wanted to revisit the list to see what we could've/should've packed.  Bottom line is that even though some people thought we were crazy in packing so little was that we actually over-packed if you can believe it.  So much so that we ended up sending a box of things back to Canada during our stay in Cardiff to make room for gifts and souvenirs along the way.  It was not too much hassle and inexpensive (30 GBP).

The big reason for not using everything is that we ended up doing laundry more frequently and the weather held up for almost our entire trip.  Here is the list again, this time with columns indicating what we could've gotten away with in the "After" columns.

Item	Rick	Victor (Before)	Victor (After)	Siew (Before)	Siew (After)
Shirts	5	7	6	8	6
Sweaters	1	1	0	2	1
Pants	2	2	2	3	2
Shorts	1	1	1	2	2
Swimsuit	1	1	1	1	1
Underwear	5	6	5	6	5
Socks	5	6	5	6	5
PJs	1	1	1	2	2
Shoes	1	2	2	2	2
Jacket	1	1	1	1	1
Tie/Scarf	1	0	0	0	0

But this discussion is not limited to clothes as this is the easy part.  A lot of room is taken up bt all the knick-knacks and miscellaneous things that you end up bringing.  The biggest offenders for us were books (activity, music, homework) as they heavy and bulky while taking up valuable space.  We found these the least used items and (for Chloe) the least interesting items.  She much preferred stories about when we were small and what we used to do when we were kids and no homework :)