While Traveling: Note to Self

My husband, daughter, and I spent a week in Puerto Rico last week. (Here we are at one of the waterfalls in El Yunque, the rainforest outside of San Juan.) It was a lovely, warm week full of lots of swimming and sleeping. But the one thing that nagged at me the whole time was the absurd collection of plastic bags we were accumulating while there. It was nice to have a Walgreen's right across the street for those items that we deliberately didn't pack (we could buy diapers there; we didn't need to pack them") or didn't realize we'd need (the condo where we stayed had a kitchen, but no dishwashing soap). At first, these bags were a blessing, since one of the other things that the condo didn't have on hand were trash bags to line the garbage cans. So we were thankful to have a few extra bags to use for our daughter's dirty diapers, etc. But by day 5, it seemed ridiculous. So note to self: put cloth/reusable bags on the travel packing check list. I'm so conscious of reusing bags here at home; it was so wasteful to have forgotten that practice while traveling.