The Hillbilly Viking

Whenever Patty and I first start contemplating an extended trip, especially abroad, we start stockpiling our cheapest, oldest clothes. You know the ones. The items you don’t really wear but still can’t seem to give up on: Shiraz-stained blouses, underwear that’s lost its will to elasticize, 5K funwalk T’s, shorts that make you look too Greek, shoes that fit better in your Amazon cart than on your feet.

Anyway, these are the clothes we primarily take with us on vacation, and then once we have soiled them there, we casually toss them in hotel trash bins for our host country to deal with. We’re basically Old Navy reptiles molting our skins at every point along our trip-tik.

Yes, it’s an arrogantly colonial way to retire clothing, but the selfish benefit is that our baggage gets progressively lighter and easier to manage throughout the trip (making more room for duty-free liquor). Also, if the airlines lose our luggage, no big loss (other than to the Goodwill).

On the downside, trekking around exotic locales in gravy-spotted separates and bleached-out, gym clothes tends to generate vacation reels that look more like refugee, relocation footage than Instagram, influencer content, but that’s a hit our egos are apparently willing to take, as we’ve been doing it for years.

My looming fear, however, is that our capricious tossing of soiled undergarments and the like will come back to haunt us, and we’ll one day return to a previously visited, vacation destination to find it overgrown with groves of dirty underwear trees invasively sprouted up around moderately priced, positively reviewed, Expedia hotels.

“Mommy, what kind of tree is that?”

“It’s an American Dingleberry; Don’t touch it!”

Alas, we reap what we sow.