Dear Friends,
Being in the midst of the summer travel season provides the perfect time to cull our collective experiences and collect your tried and true travel tips to share. If something works for you, please share it with us. We need all the help we can get. To get your mind in gear, consider these categories:
Planning and Research
Do you have a favorite website or app that is your go-to for destinations, hotels or air travel? Do you use a trusted travel advisor? If so, who?
Clothes and Packing
The travel cubes shown above are the ones I introduced in Organized for Travel.
What works for you? Do you take only carry-on luggage? What do you consider when selecting your clothes and shoes? Of course packing depends on your destination, but I know a few clever travelers out there who seem to pack in one small suitcase and always look put together, no matter the locale.
Airline Carry-on’s ~ What’s in Your Bag?
What precious few things accompany you on board a flight? Can you recommend any gadgets or food you couldn’t do without?
Fitness While Away
Do you try to work in any fitness routines while you are traveling? If so, please share what you do and if you bring any special equipment along to help. I shared these ideas from Zinger Fit for my Italian choir trip a few years ago but am always on the lookout for fresh ideas.
Travel Apps
Do you depend on any apps on your phone to help while you are away? Think about apps for navigation, communication, record-keeping and document organization.
Souvenirs
I bought this yummy blanket made from Icelandic wool in Reykjavik, a trip I shared here.
Have you found and/or purchased site-specific souvenirs that can’t be found elsewhere? It’s fun to bring home a found only in ______ , like my Icelandic wool blanket. I would love to know about unique goods to look for at my next destination.
Documentation
Do you document your trip? If so, how? Think journals, photos, scrapbook or photo book.
Large Group Travel
Have you planned travel for a group, say a destination wedding or family reunion? If so, do you have any words of wisdom to help make the experience fun for all, especially YOU?
This category list is not exhaustive, so if you have a tip that doesn’t fit a category, send it anyway! With all the travel many of you do (I’m thinking of you dNz), we are bound to have the best tried and true tips. You can send your tips via email to me:
or
by responding in the Comment Box at the bottom of this post.
And speaking of traveling, I wanted to follow up with you the tray makeover that was inspired by my trip to Paris which I wrote about here.
A bit of sanding and two coats of primer removed the rust and prepped the surface for the acrylic paint. I took an Hermes scarf box with me to the craft store to match the orange color (Folk Art Acrylic #741 Glazed Carrots) and picked Neutral Grey by Americana for the gray trim. I just love the feeling of a completed project: DONE.
Please respond to this request for travel tips quickly. We’d like to publish our collective tips by the end of July.
July 6, 2017
We recently traveled to Portugal. We used “MobilePassport” on the return for our customs forms (you can only seem to access it on the App store on your mobile device… couldn’t pull it up on the computer). It was awesome! You complete your customs forms on the app and then submit as you deplane. There is a separate line for those using the app in the customs area. We breezed right through!
We downloaded “WhatsApp” for free international texting and calling. The key is it can only be used when you have wifi access. You can, of course, text in wifi anyway, but I believe you can make calls, too, which is extra nice, especially if you need to keep in touch with children or caregivers at home.
Be sure to see if the airport offers an electronic passport line… when we were leaving Lisbon, we were able to use that line to get to our gate (thankfully, our passports are new enough that they have the chip required) and literally saved over an hour in line to access departure gates. It worked for us because our original country of entry was Portugal… it doesn’t seem to work if you entered in one country but are departing from another (lots of people frustrated because of this…).
Also, my husband convinced me to travel with only a carry-on bag. That was a lifesaver when we missed our overseas flight and had to wait 24 hours for the next flight. We had our bags, so we just hopped in an Uber and headed to a hotel and a really nice, unexpected dinner in the NYC area.
The best travel tip I can give is to stay positive when things don’t go as planned. Live by Pat Summit’s moto… It is what it is, but it will be what I make it. 🙂
I just purchased a set of luggage from Away…..love them!! They were 1/3 of the cost of the Tumi set that I was considering. Good stuff. And I got a small attractive backpack from Everlane, online also, that I use instead of a purse when traveling. PS – I LOVE THAT RUG IN THE PICTURE! WHERE DID IT COME FROM? I NEED ONE FOR MY GUEST ROOM……thanks….
Love to travel and now with some extra spending money with the last one just graduating from college the list has gotten even longer! I was never a cruise person but was convinced to go on a family cruise with other family friends and have became a huge fan of Silversea Cruise Line. We have completed 4 cruises with them. we went to the Gallapagos, Med, Baltic, and Alaska. The numbers on the cruise are small ( 300 or so) and the trips in port are wonderful. Because the ships are smaller you are able to get in smaller ports and waits on and off the ship are really are minimal. You can also hire a guide through them and plan your own day trip.
We plan a lot of our own trips, but have used Caroline Wallace at Brownell Travel two times and have been extremely happy with the planning and service.
We have a bucket list of places in the USA as well as outside our borders and have found talking to friends has always been a huge help.
We just took a family vacation to Portugal and absolutely loved the country. Delta now has a nonstop flight from JFK to Lisbon which is great and one less connection to miss ( especially with summer storms). And if summer storms cancel all the flights to JFK from RVA, Dulles, and National you can rent a car and drive to JFK one way!
Thank you so much Darcie! I appreciate the intel on Silversea and the direct flight from JFK to LIsbon. Portugal is on my bucket list. I knew you would have awesome insight.
Agree with Darcie — the small cruise liners are wonderful and we have enjoyed Windstar the past two summers, about 200 +/- people and awesome destinations. We always buy tickets to attractions ahead of time which is critical when traveling during the summer because the lines for museums/cathedrals et al are impossibly long. I just returned from Amsterdam and if you had not booked a ticket well ahead of time to the Anne Frank House or Van Gough Museum you were out of luck — no same-day purchases. When we are in a new locale, we love to take the Segway tours (we use Viator to book) and get the lay of the land. Yes, you might think we are a little cheesy but it’s fresh air and we get a unique view of a new spot (Barcelona, Lisbon, Milan, Valetta last 2 years). We have also used Viator to book small walking tours. In Paris earlier this year (January) we were the only two (idiots!) on a walking tour of Montmartre so we had the guide to ourselves. If you can travel off-season, it’s a better way to avoid the crowds through Europe but GO whenever you can! We do all our own planning and go cheap on airline fares (Icelandic Air rocks!) but splurge on hotels and focus on the Small Hotels of the World as destinations — we have not yet been disappointed. As for site-specific items, some recent favorites are from Seville Spain which has glorious pottery (an olive oil jug sits atop my kitchen counter now) and Italy (especially Amalfi Coast) has the distinctive DeRuta patterns that are pure joy and cashmere scarves for family from northern Scotland from a shop that has been there since the 1630s! At this point in our lives, we are trying for more experiences and less stuff…. I have to go back and re-read your posts on packing — I need soooo much help!!
Wow Laurie thanks for all the tips! I wish I had known about the pottery in Seville when I was there in 2015. I haven’t heard of Viator but will be sure to check it out. Look for our Tried and True Travel Tips next week!