Usually when we come back from holiday we have about 48 hours, at most, before the girls have to be back at school. We have a hundredweight of washing to do, last minute school panics and the dogs to pick up from the kennels. Consequently I plan to within an inch of everyone’s lives. I do not want to come back to chaos, I want to hit the ground running.
We may not have been minimalist in the past but I was organised.
How the mighty are fallen.
We are going to Australia next year. The Boss is doing a lecture tour and I am chief bag carrier. The lovely lady who is planning our flights needs scans of our passports. My passport runs out in March but we are going to Padua in October (another lecture, I could get used to this). Never mind, said the lovely lady, just send a scan of the current one and then the new one when you get it.
So I go to the passport box. Reader, you are ahead of me. They were not there.
I have a momentary panic that in my supercharged decluttering I have given our passports to the local charity shop. Somewhere this is another Smellie family complete with identical twins doing nefarious things in the far east…..
I am cheered when the Dancer informs me that the current cost of a lost passport is £150 each. A grand total of £750. £750 I do not have to spare.
I start to think laterally, I look in the pantry, in the laundry.
This year we came back from holiday faced with another five weeks of school holidays. There was no panic, no rush and I DIDN’T PUT THE PASSPORTS AWAY! Because I had all the time in the world, and there were so many other things that I wanted to get on with.
I was convinced I had taken them out of my travelling tote. That they had been “put” somewhere. Finally I conceded that perhaps I hadn’t. But where the heck was the tote I took on holiday? It wasn’t where it ought to be (another failure to put something in its rightful place due to the lacksidaisical attitude).
I stood in the kitchen and wondered if it was worth weeping, when out of the corner of my eye I espied the tote in question. It was hanging on the back of the pantry door with the spare shopping bags. And it it….. the passports.
Lesson learned? Just because you are not working to a deadline does not mean that you can “leave it till tomorrow”. Because tomorrow you will forget and by day three total amnesia will have set in.
Everything has its place and it should be in it now, not when you get around to it.
one pair of shoes at a time 
We had a passport crisis this summer, for a similar reason. Our passports live in a blue passport wallet. I took them out to do online check-in, but I didn’t put them back In the wallet. Near hte wallet, but not in the wallet. DH took the wallet to the airport, but he didn’t check the passports were inside because they are always inside. Except they weren’t, because I didn’t put them away properly. Queue one almighty nightmare of a day!
I remember reading your posts …. I was chewing my nails to the quick!
Great little lesson. Having a place for everything is much easier when you have less stuff.
What cities are you visiting in Australia? If it works out, it would be lovely to meet you whilst you’re here.
We fly to Melbourne, then to Sydney and then the Gold Coast. We have some time off in all places and in the GC we are going to go Byron Bay. Fly home from Sydney. Would love more time to explore but it is technically a working a holiday and the kids will be home alone in England 😮