We love to travel and we do it as often as we can. Usually our journeys are within Mexico, but we recently completed an 11 week trip through Europe, which had us staying at 16 different vacation homes and renting four cars (which turned into 6 cars after 2 broke down on us) and taking a variety of trains, planes and ships for transport. Moving around this much, we found a few items that came in extremely handy and we thought we would share them with you.
When you travel to several locations, we cannot say enough about the humble little packing cube. These zippered bags kept our luggage organized, our clothes wrinkle free and allowed us to unpack and repack in seconds, saving precious vacation minutes. We bought ours in the family section of Ikea. But you can get similar ones here on Amazon.
I went even one step further with my cubes and used some liquid paint to tell me what is inside each cube, so that I don’t have to go looking through them when I am in a hurry.
Another thing that I found invaluable, is this little travel blow dryer. My husband actually laughed out loud when he opened the box that this came in. It is so small that it looks like a toy, but it isn’t. It is a really powerful travel dryer. A lot of hotels in Mexico do not offer blow dryers, so this one comes in really handy. And you can switch it from 120v to 220v for travel abroad.
We seem to travel with more and more electronic devices that need constant recharging. When overseas, we like this one. It converts 220v to our 120v. It has four USB plugs, and it comes with enough adapters to plug in anywhere from from Albania to Zimbabwe. It works when plugged into 120v as well, so you can use it anywhere. It’s compact, but has lots of places to plug in, because there are never enough outlets in most hotel rooms or vacation rentals.
In Mexico we use one like this that has a built-in surge protector for the sometimes unsteady current we get in Mexico. This has saved our gadgets on many occasions, plus the USB connections come in really handy.
Good idea to have a two-prong adapter as well, as you will see two prong outlets in older Mexican hotels and even some vacation rentals.
And one last item. If you are renting a car, most of the cars in Mexico are very basic and don’t come with USB chargers. We highly recommend bringing a USB lighter/adapter to keep your phones/GPS charged while you are enjoying that driving trip to Chichen Itza.
If you have any travel gadgets your can’t live without, drop us a line, we would like to hear about them.
