Fantastic advice, all!! I know people will really benefit from this thread!! I would add: if you are flying to college, and attending near a Bed Bath and Beyond (e.g. Boston), strongly consider purchasing your dorm essentials at home using their handy system. They have a truly magical system. You can go to your local BBB NOW, and use their SKU gun to find items off the shelf. It feels like a wedding registry, but it is NOT. Instead, BBB sends the list to the Boston location, and their staff immediately pulls the items OFF THE SHELF, and puts them in boxes behind the store for you. When you arrive in Boston, you provide your ticket, and they dump all your stuff out on a table. You sort through it, pick the stuff that you still want, put the stuff you don’t want in a “reshelving area”, walk through the store for that fan that you forgot to list, and buy what you chose. No prepaying, no penalty for changing your mind, but the bedspread you want is available, and the stuff you need is RIGHT THERE. Instead of renting a car, and spending a couple of days finding dorm gear, we took the T to BBB, spend 90 minutes and got nearly everything that she needed, and took a TAXI back to our condo. Bippity boppety boo! We then realized that we forgot a few things, and took a taxi to the local target - it was horrible. Nothing on the shelves, wall to wall people, etc. SO recommend BBB - especially if you are moving to a city like Boston with multiple colleges. And yes, you can order on Amazon, but how many Amazon boxes do you think the University will have on move in day??? And how many boxes will your student have in their room??