Your flights are booked, you know where the embassy and hospital are, you may have a list of restaurants you want to try or sights you want to see. You’re a few days out from your trip, and you’re starting to pack. I tend to start packing about 3 days before the trip. Generally, what I take on the trip isn’t stuff that I use when I’m home, so I can pack early. If I find that I’m missing something necessary, I can get on Amazon and get it shipped to me within a day or two and still be ok. If you’re like my friend Cristina, you’ll start packing the night before the trip and spend about 8 hours trying to sort through things to figure out what to bring and what to leave behind. Either approach is valid (but mine is better). Wherever you’re going, there are probably a few things that are staples for almost any trip.
Power adapters- Unless you’re staying in the US, you may need a power adapter to convert their outlet to something you can use. With more and more chargers going to USB these days, I’d actually recommend getting an AC to USB charger with multiple USB ports. With that, you can charge your phone, camera, iPod, tablet, GoPro, Zune and toaster oven all at the same time. If you get a standard AC adapter, you may be limited to just one or two things. And speaking of chargers…
Charging cables- Duh. Even if you’re going completely off-grid for a week, you’ll still want your cable, just in case.
Currency- If you’re going someplace with a different unit of currency, get some local money from your bank before you leave. You may need it at the airport or for a taxi or bus. I also take few extra dollars, since they can be exchanged for local currency almost anywhere that English is spoken. Charles Schwab has a no-minimum balance online checking account that comes with an ATM card with no ATM fees. I just used it in Italy with no problems. It took about 2 or 3 weeks to get the account set up and the funds into the account, but once I did, it worked like a charm. As for exchanging money, if you’re still in your home country, do it at your bank. You can request the money online and it’ll be ready for you in a few days. When you’re traveling, go with the ATM machine. Avoid the Travelex kiosks at the airport and avoid changing money at the hotels. Those are the biggest ripoffs. If you use your credit card for transactions, make sure there’s no foreign transaction fee. I recently got the Chase Sapphire for exactly this reason. Lots of miles, no annual fee for the first year, no foreign transaction fees.
Passport- If you go to the airport for an international trip and you don’t have this, you don’t deserve to travel. Go home and think about what a fool you are. While you’re packing it, make a copy of your passport and put it in one of your travel bags, separate from your passport. I also scanned in my passport and I keep the image saved in my email account. You can get the same result by taking a picture with your phone and emailing it to yourself. So if all hell breaks loose while I’m traveling, as long as I can get to a computer, I can start to establish my citizenship.
Travel clothes- I recently started wearing Ex Officio shirts and underwear on my travels. They are lightweight and they dry quickly. You can wash them in the sink and they’ll dry overnight, which is great. For a week in Italy, I packed 2 shirts and 3 pairs of underwear and washed stuff every night. Unfortunately, I look the same in all of my pictures, but it also means that I’m not lugging around 8 shirts for a 1-week trip. I also threw in a long sleeve button-down to wear over the t-shirt if it was cold, which came in handy a few times. I also got a pair of Columbia pants that have zip-off legs. If it’s warm, you have shorts. If it’s not, you have longs. One pair of pants for most climates. Very convenient.
Misc- This is all the other random crap that I tend to forget that we tend to overlook. First, an admission: I wear a fanny pack on long flights. I’d rather look goofy than have a bunch of crap in my pockets for 8 hours, making me uncomfortable while I’m trying to sleep. In the fanny pack, I have my wallet, passport, printed copy of my itinerary (including information I’ll need upon landing), a pen (useful for customs and arrival forms), and a few other things. The fanny pack stays around my waist for the entire flight. If anything else goes wrong, at least I have that stuff. I also have a cheap digital watch, so I don’t have to keep pulling out my phone when I’m traveling to see what time it is. On the watch strap, I have a compass, which has come in handy more times than I can count. If you’re lost in a foreign city, even if you have a map, knowing where north is can be quite useful. I’d recommend gluing the compass to the strap, since it’s not really secure on its own. Speaking of watches, set it to the local time for your destination when you get on the plane. Your ticket will show your arrival time for that time zone, so you’ll easily know how much longer you’re stuck in that seat without having to do math in your head. Throw a small keychain flashlight in your bag, too. I have one in white and one in red. The red is good for seeing around the hotel room at night without ruining your night vision and waking people up. The white is useful in case you need to really see well or get someone’s attention. Get stuck in a hotel during a power outage and you’ll appreciate these little guys. I usually have a baseball cap with me, although not a lot of people wear them in foreign countries. Wearing one could tag you as an American. (Especially if the hat has a bald eagle on it with “Go ‘Merica!” on the front.) Maybe you want to be identified as an American, maybe you don’t. Given the anti-American sentiment these days, I prefer to stay under the radar. Not that I don’t love my country, mind you. I’d just rather not be taken hostage and used for bargaining.
Well, that’s about it for my packing list. On my recent trip, I think that a little over half of the weight in my bag was non-clothing. Partly because I packed 2 shirts instead of 8, but also because I had a ton of books, chargers and electronics and stuff like that. I could probably have cut some of it out, since not all of it was necessary. But even with overpacking my non-clothing gear, my 40L bag was still about 1/3 empty, so I had plenty of room for souvenirs or to carry Cristina’s stuff when she had too many bags to get onto one of the flights. Not that I’m calling her out on a public blog or anything….
In my travel notes, I also have one personal note that I needed to write down because I kept screwing this up and it may be appropriate for everyone. I feel like I should end with this:
** Do not underpack because you don’t want to carry the weight. You’re not that lazy, idiot.
(Yes, my notes to myself say ‘idiot.’)
