Travel Items

We just got back from a 6 week trip in Europe. Mostly in Spain with a couple days in Amsterdam and week in Scotland to make it more complicated. A couple of years ago we did 3 months which was great but also kind of too long but that’s another story.

This is just a post about some of the travel items we use that we found to be pretty nice and helpful.

We use the osprey farpoint travel backpacks. I like backpack versus roller bag for travel because I don’t have to think about how to navigate places other than just “can i walk there?”. The backpacks don’t really meet the size restrictions for carry on but if they aren’t overfull we’ve never failed to be able to squish them in the overhead compartments on US or International flights. On the EU discount airlines we chose to just check them since it wasn’t worth the hassle.

My international plug adapter broke while we were over there so I bought this to replace it.

The nice thing is that it will also charge my Macbook and so on future trips I won’t have to bring the brick for it either. It was pretty easy to do the purchase on Amazon Spain and have it delivered to a nearby locker.

We had to do more flights than we hoped on this trip, so to reduce the amount of liquids we carried we got shampoo and conditioner bars that we could carry on the plane. They worked fine anytime we stayed somewhere which didn’t have a supply.

I’m pretty unorganized in general so I’m also a big fan of packing cubes or just some nice organizer bags.

This was my first time trying compression socks and they made the long flights a lot more comfortable. For 2 hrs or less it didn’t seem to matter but for anything over 4 hours it makes a big difference.

That’s all I can think of right now. I might write some more later about some of the the highlights of the trip such as Ruta del Cares.