- A Dedicated Poolside Bag
This bag, made of water-resistant or plasticky material, has a dedicated function on our holidays, and isn’t used for anything else. Why? Because even on a small ship, trekking 3 kids from cabin to pool and back can be a bit of a mission, and this bag’s purpose is to make it easier.
It holds dry clothes, wet clothes, towels, suncream, kids’ shoes, water bottles, hair bobbles, a magazine or two… you name it! Everything you might need for a fun afternoon at the pool can be shoved in here, wet or dry.
Obviously, it needs to be a good size, but not too large, as you might need to take it to the buffet afterwards! It means that everyone doesn’t have armfuls of stuff when walking around the ship, and if you need to move deck chairs, or take everyone back to the cabin, tired and dripping wet, these transitions can be managed with ease.
A dedicated bag means your rucksack doesn’t get damp, or any of your other items damaged when the inevitable sun-cream spillage occurs!
- A Dedicated Laundry Bag
You might now be wondering if my suitcase is just stuffed full of other types of bag, but trust me, this really does come in handy. We have a large cotton sack which is our laundry bag for our cabin. At the end of the day, everyone puts their dirty clothes in there, and it keeps them separate and tidy.
A lot of people do use a suitcase for this, but I prefer a bag for several reasons. Firstly, it takes up a lot less floor space, and you don’t have to keep unzipping it or moving it from under the bed. Also, with a large family, I quickly find that what started as putting items inside a suitcase, rapidly becomes just a pile of dirty clothing on top of a suitcase, which is not very pleasant.
My laundry bag folds up very small to pack, sits neatly in a corner of the cabin, and it is very easy for a child of any age to put their dirty clothes inside and out of the way. At the end of the cruise I simply empty the bag into a suitcase, flatten out the piles and zip it up. No more hunting for displaced items under the bed, no more wrestling with suitcases throughout your trip. Simple!
- A Dedicated Return Travel Outfit
I pack these for all of us. It is a comfortable, clean outfit, usually tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, that stays in the suitcase all holiday until the day of the return journey. I much prefer this to simply wearing any leftover clothes, which by the end of the holiday are often ones that are not your favourite or don’t fit very well (especially if you’ve made good use of the food options available!).
Having a nice, clean, comfortable outfit helps everybody cope with what can be a difficult, long and sad day. Your holiday is over, you’re facing a twelve-hour journey back to real life, and the last thing you want to do is put on your least favourite pair of shorts and the top that emphasises your buffet-belly! Make it a nice outfit to put on, and I promise you’ll feel better.
Crucially, especially if you’ve been somewhere hot and are travelling back to a much cooler UK, this outfit can also help deal with the transition. It’s horrible to get on a flight in sunny Europe in your shorts and vest, only to step off into a rainy UK and find yourself shivering! So, this outfit includes long trousers, and a jumper packed into a backpack, ready for our home climate.
We did this on our most recent cruise: on our last morning in Rome, we all put on long trousers and packed a jumper, even though the day before it had been 38 degrees! We only had to put up with it for an hour until we were in the air conditioned airport, and everyone really appreciated it when we got back to the UK and it was back to a measly 15 degrees!
- Non-Screen-Based Activities
Now I admit, for long journeys, our children do spend most of the time on their tablets. It is easier than providing constant entertainment, they enjoy it, and it takes part of the stress out of a very long and difficult day for us.
However, we all know that hours and hours of screen time isn’t great for kids, and so once we arrive on the ship the tablets go away, not to be seen again until the return journey. We also have moments during the journey when the kids do need a break from their screens, or their tablet runs out of battery, or has to be packed away for some reason. So, I make sure they always take some alternative activities. I like to give them a little puzzle book and a pencil, and they normally take a reading book as well, and perhaps some colouring.
These items also help us to maintain some of our home routines whilst on ship. Our kids are used to reading before bed each night, so having a book helps to settle them down for bed during the cruise, especially for the first few nights, when everything is new. Even after a very long and exciting day, 10 to 15 minutes of reading brings them back down, and makes sure they get to sleep much faster. Win-win!
- Enough Chargers
This might seem like an obvious one, but I’m not just talking about phone chargers! With five of us, we have a lot of electronics: tablets and phones, but also things like electric toothbrushes and razors, all of which need charging.
It might seem an inconvenience to pack bulky electronic toothbrushes when you can pack small disposable ones, but the children do end up eating more sugar than usual on a cruise, so this is an important one for me. But that means that we need a charger for them, because inevitably they run out of battery!
Myself and my husband also have wireless headphones, which come in very handy when we need a little bit of space to ourselves. All this adds up to a lot of chargers though! And often cabins do not have a huge amount of plugs, so you need to make the best use of what you have.
Pay attention to what type of and how many plugs are available to you in your cabin, and make sure you bring enough plug adapters. Our last cruise was with Royal Caribbean, which is an American ship, so we were prepared for American plug types in the rooms. However, they also had a European plug socket in there as well, and luckily we had a European plug adapter with us too, so we were able to make use of this.
6-10 coming soon…