Last weekend, my wife and I took the family on the road, piling all five kids into our SUV for an 11-hour drive to the beach. The ride was nothing, however, compared to the effort to load up all our junk and get on the road.

While we have a car that's bigger than any sane person would want (with the low gas mileage to prove our insanity), it's still not spacious enough to hold seven people and their luggage. So we have one of those huge white plastic rooftop carriers that makes us look like the Bradys on the way to the Grand Canyon.

Invented sometime after the development of plastic but before the concept of aerodynamics, it sticks a good 3 feet up from our roof, threatening to topple us if we round a curve too quickly or hit a crosswind.

For some reason, we call this thing the Boodle. I'm not sure where this name came from, but my wife started referring to it that way years ago. At some point, I got tired of asking and just accepted it. We've been calling it the Boodle for 10 years at least, and no one's changing now.

The Boodle sits in the back of our garage 51 weeks a year, gathering dust and providing a home to bugs, bats and, one year, a raccoon. It's supposed to be water-tight but nobody takes that seriously. We all know, should we run into a storm, that we'll be wearing wet clothes for a few days.

Like all dads, I'm kind of obsessive about making sure that we pack properly, and we have kind of a ritual each year. I get everyone to line up their bags, personal possessions and sports equipment on the front lawn. Then I survey the load against our available space. Then I shout at my wife that it will never fit and we'll have to call off the vacation.

Some of this is a Scotty from "Star Trek" thing. Every time he said "Capn', the warp engines canna take any more!" he was just trying to point out how hard his job was and how unappreciated he was. But a big part of it is that my wife seems to feel she has to take every piece of clothing she has ever owned for just three days at the beach.

I bring a bathing suit, a couple of T-shirts and one pair of boxer shorts for each day (fewer if the house has a laundry room). She brings 11 pairs of shoes, 14 different outfits and enough earrings to open up a pawn shop. If our house burned down while we were gone, she could comfortably start a new life just on the contents of her bag.

After throwing my yearly pointless fit, I pack every square inch of the Boodle, working toward that magic point where it just barely closes but isn't so packed that it's impossible to latch. Anything that can't fit in the Boodle goes under people's feet or packed behind their heads. Our twin daughters, who sit in the far back, get it the worst. Sometimes they're packed so tightly with groceries and beach toys that they have to sit up straight, their hands in their laps, unable to turn their heads unless they want to start an avalanche of cereal boxes.

The girls groan, but I tell them to knock it off, as they can use the stuff as pillows when they fall asleep. When I said this last week, one daughter scowled at me and knocked her knuckles against a six-pack of beer, the metal ringing across the car.

"Gee thanks," she said. "Pleasant dreams!"

The Boodle packed to capacity, and strapped to the car with enough bungee cords to jump off a bridge, I pull out onto our street, ready for another adventure. I'm confident of my weight distribution ratios, packing skills and the fastness of the knots on my tiedowns. I'm more than just Scotty. I'm the captain of this bad boy. We've got nothing to worry about.

Unless we run into a crosswind.