In Love with France, At Home In Italy

I may live on two continents, but that doesn't mean that I travel well. Maybe a photo or two of the toilettries I brought on a recent 5-day trip will suffice to explain.  True confession: I am a reforming hoarder who has really tried to cut back on what I need to bring when leaving home, but you probably couldn't tell from these pictures. And this isn't even all of it. In an effort at self-help, I'm going to list some of these objects, and think out loud about how necessary they are.  
 ON SECOND THOUGHT, NEVER MIND! I see that I started this post over a month ago, and it just sat here waiting for me to deal with it. ARGH! More hoarding? 
But maybe there's another way to look at it: I knew I had another trip coming up, and my intention was to study all this stuff and see what I could do to travel lighter. As an extra incentive, there would be no checked bags, and the weight limit for carry-on was 8 kilo...

A TWO-QUESTION QUIZ: HOW OLD IS "OLD"? HOW OLD IS TOO OLD FOR "GOODNIGHT MOON"?   The answer to the first question is "5 years older than you." The answer to the second about when you're too old for the children's classic, "Goodnight Moon," is NEVER. While painfully packing everything up to head back to my other country and life, I started thinking about "Goodnight Moon." I recall the first time I heard about that book. A neighbor, the wife of a minister who was moving to a new location was having a tag sale. And unlike yours truly, she was not a hoarder. Although my son was only about nine months old at the time, I was drawn to the children's books that she was selling. Among them was this odd little paperback that was not in very good condition. "Goodnight Moon?" "Never heard of it. Looks a bit boring.  I'm not sure I want that one." "Oh...

VEHICLES In addition to being a cyber-dunce, I have no understanding of what makes a vehicle tick. Why should something as heavy as an airplane ever get off the ground? (Especially with all the extra weight my husband, aka Babbo Natale, has in his holiday suitcase)  That's probably why I place so much faith in my magic, flowered, flying shirt and my I AM CALM socks. These are an indispensable part of my travel "uniform," which includes, of course, my magic shirt --the one that keeps the plane aloft. You've read about this before in one of my earliest posts from 2011    RECONNECTING   and also in my very first post, RISTRUTTURARE: RENOVATE, REBUILD, RESURRECT Flash to the moment it came time to leave our middle-of-nowhere-Italian home-reachable-only-by-two-routes-each-worse-than-the-other for a lovely-sounding holiday party.  Even on a good day, I think of our 2002 Renault as The Little Engine That Could. You've heard about this ca...