It was 2 p.m. on Friday. I’d been in New Zealand and Australia for two weeks, but now I was at Ashby BART station, sitting on the hot ground, surrounded by our bags.

Peter had gone up the street to retrieve our car, and there I sat with four suitcases, two big boxes, two carry-ons and a gigantic purse.

In my 15-minute stint as a bag lady, I had time to reflect on all of our adventures, and to ponder how the luggage surrounding me had grown so extensively.

One box was filled with wine. While exploring the Barossa Valley in Australia (think Napa Valley, but with an accent), we managed to acquire quite a few bottles. Some ports, some shiraz. No whites for me. Apparently, I don’t like sauvignon blanc here or there.

Another box, long and awkward, housed Peter’s new cricket bat and field hockey stick. Cricket, my new favorite sport, requires a bat that looks like a squished baseball bat with a little fin on the back. I suspect the cricket bat will end up as an art piece on the wall, while Peter swears that will not be the fate of the hockey stick.

What we couldn’t fit into the bags, but thankfully had the cameras to capture, were all the amazing views and sights in Sydney and Adelaide in Australia, and Wellington, Auckland, Waitamo and Lake Taupo in New Zealand. We met up with three sets of family friends, two sets of aunts, uncles and cousins, and Peter’s dad. That’s a lot to pack into two weeks.

Those bags sitting around me at BART also were full of stuff I didn’t need. I didn’t need shorts, skirts and dresses, as the weather was chilly to chillier the whole trip. I didn’t need my blow dryer — or the electrical converter that caught on fire while using that blow dryer.

All in all, I probably wore about 20 percent of the stuff I packed. Same with Peter, which goes to show overpacking is not just a girl thing.

Items that did come in handy were the maps, hotel confirmations and itineraries I neurotically collected, and of course, my book on the native lingo. While Peter, an Australian native, clicked right back into his old accent, it was trickier for me.

Saying “mate” at the end of every sentence doesn’t come naturally. It requires practice.

Same with my left-side-of-the-road driving skills. I tried to go backwards through the roundabout enough times to tell me that maybe this way of driving wasn’t for me.

When Peter came back to the BART station, he commented on how heavy the luggage had become. I noted that once we unpacked our clothes, along with the boomerang, the stuffed koala, the special New Zealand honey and the aboriginal mask, we’d appreciate our trip even more.

I’m not cut out to be a bag lady or to live out of a suitcase. But it’s nice to fill them — and the memory and experience banks — every once in a while.

Girl on the Go appears every other week, alternating with Jennifer Huffman’s Surrendering to Motherhood. Contact Michelle at mchoat@napanews.com.