Our Pre-Trip Ritual : The 7 Days Before Departure

There is a specific type of travel article that goes viral on Instagram. The "7 days before departure checklist." The one with 47 bullet points, a packing cube hierarchy, three different document folders, and a 48-hour meditation window.

I'm about to disappoint you.

Our pre-trip ritual is nothing like that.

In fact, over the years, I've realised that most of what makes our trips feel calm and easy isn't a complicated system. It's a few small things we actually do, surrounded by a lot of things we have decided not to do.

Here's the honest version.

1. What We Don't Do

Permission to breathe.

Let me start with the parts of the standard pre-trip advice that we do not do.

• We do not pack 7 days in advance.

• We do not make an elaborate 48-item checklist.

• We do not have packing cubes organised by category.

• We do not do a "digital declutter" or auto-reply for 15 days of inbox silence.

• We do not meditate the night before.

• We do not do a dry-run suitcase.

  
  

None of this. Not for lack of trying. I tested some of these systems in my 20s. They all added more stress than they removed.

The verdict : half of pre-trip ritual advice is designed to make calm people feel busy.

2. What We Actually Do, Days Out

A short list of things that matter.

The whole week before departure, two things actually happen in our house.

One : the pharmacy run.Three to five days before travel, I do one trip to the pharmacy for the trip-specific items. Mosquito repellent, basic meds (paracetamol, imodium, antihistamines), sunscreen top-up, re-hydration sachets. I keep a list in my phone that I update after every trip. Twenty minutes. Done.

Two : the house cleaning.Here's one that most people don't do. I do a deep clean of the house before every trip. The entire place. Floors, kitchen, bathroom, the whole thing.

Why ? Because coming back to a clean home after 15 days of travelling is one of the small gifts I give my future self. There's nothing worse than walking in exhausted after a long-haul and finding a kitchen you forgot to clean two weeks ago.

Clean house out = clean house in. Non-negotiable in my ritual.

The verdict : the real pre-trip tasks happen for your return, not for your departure.

3. The Small Sacred Things

Everybody in a couple has one.

Each of us has one small pre-trip ritual that the other has learned to respect.

Mine : I air out the suitcase a few days before.I open the suitcase. I wipe it. I let it breathe in a sunny spot. Nothing in it yet. Just the empty suitcase, clean, ready, waiting. A tiny ritual. It makes the trip start feeling real.

Nim's : he cleans his camera lenses the night before. For two hours.Every lens. One by one. Like a surgeon. I've learned not to interrupt him during this. It's his version of my suitcase ritual. His way of saying "the trip starts now."

We've both tried to speed up the other's ritual over the years. It never works. We now just let each other be weird on the eve of every trip.

The verdict : every couple has quiet pre-trip rituals that outsiders would laugh at. Protect them.

4. The Night Before : Dinner at My Parents'

Our tradition that never changes.

The evening before any big trip, Nim and I have dinner at my parents' house.

It's never a planned event. Just dinner. A bottle of wine. My mother cooks something easy. We sit at the table, we chat, we laugh. And at some point in the evening, always, my mother looks at me with that specific maternal expression and says :

"Faites attention, pas d'imprudence."

She has said this before every trip since I was 20 years old. Same six words. Same tone. Same slightly worried smile.

I used to roll my eyes at it in my twenties. Now, in my thirties, I would miss it badly if it ever stopped. It has become part of the ritual. It is the official signal that the trip has begun.

Nim knows this too. He is now part of the ritual. My mother has adopted him completely and he gets the same line directed at him.

The verdict : the best pre-trip rituals are not the ones you invent. They are the ones your family has been giving you for years, that you only start seeing as rituals in your thirties.

5. The House, the Turtle, and Maman the Star

How we leave for 15 days with zero stress.

The reason our pre-trip has so little stress is one person. My mother.

• She keeps our keys for the entire duration of the trip.

• My Grand-ma (Mamie) hosts Angel, our turtle. Yes, our turtle has a holiday destination. Yes, Angel loves spending her holidays at great-grandmother's. No, I'm not kidding.

• She would check on anything if we needed her to.

  
  

I know this is a huge privilege. Not everybody has a mother who willingly adopts the role of trip-manager-in-chief for two weeks. Mine does, and I know how much it changes the whole experience of leaving.

When you leave home knowing everything is handled, the quality of your trip changes before the plane even takes off.

She is the star of every one of our departures.

The verdict : the best pre-trip ritual sometimes isn't a thing you do. It's a person who takes care of what you leave behind.

6. The Work Non-Shutdown

My honest confession.

I need to be transparent on this one.

I don't shut down my work for 15 days.

I don't close my Hub projects. I don't do a full handover. I don't set up a 15-day out-of-office. I stay connected during the trip, with limits that I try to respect, but I'm not someone who can disconnect entirely.

I know this is not the recommended behaviour. Every productivity blog in the world will tell you to fully switch off on holiday. Nim and I have had many conversations about this over the years. He is better at it than I am.

But I have found that staying slightly connected with a window of maybe one hour per day works better for me than fully disconnecting and coming back to 400 unread messages and three fires to put out. For my brain, the slow drip is less stressful than the hard shutdown.

This is personal. It is not advice. But it is honest.

The verdict : your real pre-trip ritual has to match your actual personality. Not the one you think you should have.

7. The Morning Of

Very little, actually.

The morning of departure, there is very little drama in our house.

Suitcase packed the night before (yes, hours before, not days — more on that in a separate article). Documents in a specific pocket of the backpack. Nim does one last camera check. I do one last home sweep. We leave.

No tears. No "oh my god did we forget." No big ceremony. We've been doing this long enough that departures feel almost ordinary now.

The verdict : when your ritual is tight, the departure morning is quiet.

The Real Answer

I used to think the people with the most elaborate pre-trip rituals had the most together trips. I was wrong.

The best pre-trip ritual I've seen in fifteen years of travel is a very short one, with a few things that actually matter and a lot of things ignored.

A pharmacy run. A clean house. Dinner at my mother's with wine and "faites attention." An airing suitcase. Nim's lens cleaning. Angel the turtle at great-grandmother's. One hour of work I don't fully let go of.

That's it.

The best way to start a trip is to make leaving home feel like just another evening.

Everything else is marketing.

See you on the way out.