Dive Travel Checklist

[Trisha]

After our OKC-to-Florida RV trip I vowed I would not be washing jeans again, period.
We had wet laundry spread over the dinnette and couch, hanging from cabinet knobs, draped on bathroom hooks... and folded jeans overflowing in a laundry basket. Denim takes forever to dry, unlike most of the other items, and is heavy and bulky to boot.
So unless someone has been rock climbing or slashing through the jungle, they can take two pairs of pants instead of a bulky pair of jeans. Or they can spend time, money and patience at the campground laundromat.

 

[Charlie99]

1. Clean out the fridge of anything that I might not want to have greeting me upon my return

2. Put a hold on the mail down at the Post Office

3. Xerox key documents, including passport, plane tickets, C-cards, key phone numbers, and put this somewhere safe apart from the originals

4. Check that my vaccines are up to date, especially tetanus/diptheria

5. Make sure the pets are well cared for

Does anyone have any non gear-specific tips to share?

Since a lot of departures are early, early morning while I'm still half asleep, I made up a checklist of "house shutdown" items. Here's a few items ....

Empty trash and trash compactor (just like your note on cleaning the refrigerator, you don't want to come back to 2 week+ old garbage.)

Answering machine and alarm clocks --- turn off beepers.

Setup suspend/resume dates on newspaper delivery

water house plants

set back or turn off heating/cooling

I also have several items that kick in for longer and longer trips:

1 week ... turn down spa thermostat
2 weeks .. turn off hot water circuit breaker and circulating pump
4 weeks .. disconnect car batteries
longer .. adjust irrigation timers appropriately

If I'm feeling paranoid, I'll also turn off the water supply to the washing machine when leaving on a trip.

 

[Willar]

Unplug electric garage door opener.

Set auto-timer on interior security lights.

Open a big, big bag of food and fill the battub with water for the cat.

 

[diversteve]

I ask someone to drop by periodically and remove all the flyers from the front door.

I recently noticed that the Post office now has online mail hold. I'm going to try it next time instead of mailing in the form: https://dunsapp.usps.gov/HoldMail.jsp

A few years ago I replaced the main water valve to my house with a lever one that positively shuts off all the water to the house with a quarter turn. It's the last thing I do when I leave.

 

[caymaniac]

[QUOTE
I also turn off the water to my washing machine. Its on the second floor and would wreck the house if a hose blew while we were away.
TT [/QUOTE]

TURN OFF THE WATER!!!! I've had a line break in my bathroom and in one night, it did alot of damage. We've had this happen to us. Maybe your hot water heater will bust, maybe a plumbing pipe will break somewhere in your house. If you have city water, turn it off where it comes into your house. We have friends who went away for two weeks and the hardwood floor on their first floor buckled, their downstairs was totally trashed.

A word to the wise is sufficient.
Caymaniac

 

[markfm]

Thanks for the online mail hold tip
As to e-mailing data, there's an open-source freeware program called 7-zip, available at http://www.7-zip.org/

It's a compressor, like WinZip, but has strong encryption (256 bit AES). You can create a self-extracting archive of the info/images which is fully encrypted (doesn't require the computer you DL with to have the app installed, as long as it's Windows)

Not hard to use, I wrote up a one-pager for folks.

 

[Tim Ingersoll]

I also leave a little money at home for my wife and kids, they say that they have to eat even when I'm away, but I've never seen it, so I don't know if its true.
Better safe then sorry.

TT

Family. . . .always thinking of themselves!