Living out of two carry-on sized bags requires making some tough choices about what to bring. We can’t possibly carry everything. In fact, we can’t carry most things. But hard experience has taught us to make room for these often overlooked items.
Bags
How else could we have saved these cookies?
Russian nesting dolls have nothing on our backpacks. Unzip a compartment on any of our bags and you’ll almost certainly discover another bag. It’s quite possible that bag will contain even more bags.
We have small ziplock bags and large ziplock bags. We have grocery bags, a laundry bag, a camera bag and a purse all stuffed somewhere in one of our four backpacks. We’re bag people. It’s true.
And that’s because all of those bags come in super handy on the road. We use grocery bags for everything from cordoning off dirty laundry to shielding our electronics from the rain. We even sometimes use them for carrying groceries.
Ziplock bags, meanwhile, are great for organizing all the small stuff in our packs. Chargers, toiletries, first-aid supplies, outlet adapters, miscellaneous currency we may use again someday, and a whole host of other things are all nicely stored in their own little bags.
Larger Ziplocks make great collapsible Tupperware. We use them for storing leftovers and saving unused cooking ingredients. We’ll use them to carry spices, store sauces, or to toss together some trail mix for a hike or a long bus ride. There really is nothing they can’t do.
Earplugs
Whether we’re trying to block out the thrusting of airplane engines, the thumping of a nearby nightclub, or the thrusting and thumping of naughty neighbors, we’re always glad to have packed a good pair of sound-dampening ear plugs.
Corkscrew
You can’t really enjoy a sunset over the Seine without a bottle of wine. And you can’t really enjoy a bottle of wine unless you can open the freaking thing.
True, you can try nudging the cork out by banging the bottom of the bottle with your shoe or use some implement to jam the cork down the neck, but where’s the romance in breaking into your vin like some desperate frat boy?
We may be backpackers, but we’re not animals.
Ripped TV Shows
Great TV? Don’t leave home without it.
There was a time when cable television meant 183 channels of nothing to watch. Not any longer. Today, we have exactly the opposite problem: too many great shows to possibly keep up with.
We full-time travelers have an added challenge, though. It’s often difficult or even impossible to watch American produced shows while traveling overseas. Streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and even the web pages of the big broadcasters like NBC don’t work outside of the U.S.
Settling into our temporary living room to catch up with Game of Thrones
And although it is possible to trick these services into thinking that you haven’t left the country, that still isn’t a perfect solution for us. You see, we don’t always have internet access while traveling. No internet, no Netflix. And even when we do have wifi, it isn’t always strong enough to stream video.
That’s why we carry ripped shows wherever we go. Before leaving our shores we stocked up on DVDs for dozens of T.V. series whenever we found them on sale. We then ripped each disk’s shows to our laptop hard drive using free open-source software called Handbrake.
Now we have great T.V. wherever we go, wifi or no.
HDMI Cable
Real TV deserves a real TV screen.
Having great T.V. is one thing. But watching great T.V. is really the whole point of having great T.V. And doesn’t great television deserve a better platform for viewing than the itty-bitty screen and tinny speakers on our 13-inch laptops? We think so. And that’s why we pack an HDMI cable in our backpacks.
With this magic wire we can connect our laptops to almost any digital television set and turn it into a giant computer monitor. That way we can play our movies and shows right from our computer and watch them on the BIG screen whenever we’re lucky enough to have one.
15 Months of Prescription Meds
We’d carry even more if we could. It’s going to be hard to get prescriptions filled on the road so we’re opting to bring as large a supply as we can with us.
Most countries won’t honor prescriptions written by foreign doctors. And it’s illegal to mail them internationally from the U.S. So getting meds while away from the States could mean finding a local doctor to write you a script and hoping that whatever medication you need is available wherever you happen to be. That’s no sure thing.
Better to bring what you need along for as long as you expect to be gone.
GPS
Our 6+ year old Garmin still showing us the way in Spain
Why on earth would anyone travel with a stand-alone GPS device when you can get great directions from your smart phone? Because smart phones become dumb bricks when they’re not connected to the interweb.
For at least some of the time that we’re traveling and wanting directions, we either won’t get data reception or won’t have a data plan at all. During those times (and really all the times in between), our trusty old Garmin GPS should get us where we want to go.
Eventually we may be able to replace our GPS device with an offline mapping app for our phones. We’re going to test out several in the coming weeks to see how they do. If they work well, we could swap out our Garmin for an app. We’d be delighted to free up that room in our backpacks, possibly to hold some more bags.
What “strange” things do you bring along on your travels?
