Tips for Practical Vacationers

Organizing Principle

Less is more. You travel to capture experiences and memories, and these pop up unexpectedly. Give yourself as much chance as you can, so maximize flexibility and on-the-spot choice.

Before you go: organizing your vacation

1. Itinerary. Structure your vacation from the top down. That is, identify in broad where you want to go. Assess roughly how long you want in each place, and sketch out an itinerary. Add detail until you feel comfortable you have scheduled enough.
2. How traveler-friendly is your destination? How well do you speak the language/use the phones? Is it busy or slow season? How likely will it be for you to find what you want? How much inconvenience? How much about your country don't you know? Generally speaking, the less you know, and the harder it will be to change, the more you should plan ahead of time. When we visited the American west, we picked our motels each day. In southern Spain, we got reservations.
3. How much scheduling? There is always a tension between scheduling and flexibility. Scheduling saves time (for example, searching for a hotel or restaurant) but it imposes structure and reduces your flexibility. Changing a schedule takes emotional energy and costs time (canceling reservations, making new ones). So before you go, assess how hard it will be to make changes when you get there.
4. Time cushions. Always leave some. You are going somewhere new, and inevitably something will prove different from what you were told. It's easy to add events to an under-scheduled vacation, taking things out after you have made an itinerary is much harder.
5. A vacation from your vacation. Travel creates stress -- unfamiliar places, the anxiety of moving around and of being away from home. A brief intermezzo midway through your vacation, two days where you are not moving anywhere, is often a blissful interlude.
6. Guidebooks more than pay for themselves before you go. Buy several and use them first to assess generally where you want to go, then to pick specific highlights. (Remember, you don't have to bring every guidebook; some are better left at home.) Don't worry about opening hours or mechanical logistics; concentrate on the particulars of interest to you.
7. Culture and history matter, because context informs perception. Read some of both. Look for travel essays by good writers, and read one or two before you go.

Packing

1. Less is more. The less luggage you can take, the better. Always think of things to leave behind rather than things to take.
2. Everything is weight. Measure things by a mental usefulness-to-weight ratio.
3. Minimal reading matter. You will always find things to read in airports, hotel lounges, kiosks, and elsewhere.
4. Necessities and irreplaceables only. Remember, you can buy or rent things if you discover you need them.

Clothing

1. Layers are lightweight. You can get better results by combining layers than through single-purpose garments. Sweaters over shirts, tweed jackets over both, give you many variations. A plastic windbreaker over a sweater equals a topcoat for warmth, with half the weight and three times the options.
2. Multiple uses. Never take anything you can wear only once. That tweed jacket you use for warmth on the moors can double at dinner.
3. Accessories. Two ties plus three shirts gives you plenty of variety. Women can do it with earrings and necklaces.
4. Wear your heaviest clothes on the plane. You'll need the layers for the temperature changes on the flight, and it makes packing easier.
5. Few shoes. One pair for day walking, one pair for night (presentable in nice restaurants). And make sure both pairs are comfortable.
6. A waterproof lightweight windbreaker which, with sweaters and gloves, becomes your cold-weather gear.
7. Gloves are lightweight, warm, flexible and personal. Take them.
8. Umbrella. Find a compact one.
9. Plan on doing laundry or having it done. When you get to your destination, you will have to assess laundromat availability, but even a dropoff/ pick up laundry is worth doing. You can halve your clothes weight if you are willing to plan having laundry done.
10. Underwear is washable -- even, in a pinch, in a hotel sink or shower. Plan on doing white laundry every seven days or so.

Packing Modules

1. Pack in modules. Create sub-containers with specific purposes. This not only makes transferring easier, it helps organize your effort. These include:
   • Toilet kit. What you set up on the sink every night. Reuse small shampoo bottles from hotels (one turns into your sunscreen dispenser).
   • Medicines. A little packet of pills, ointments, vaseline, chapstick.
   • Remedies. Band-aids, rubber bands, safety pins, a tiny sewing kit, kleenex.
   • Extra glasses or equivalent. Who cares if you look dorky?
   • Papers. Copies of relevant things. See below.
   • Dormant bits. Your home keys, American money, exposed or extra film.
2. Think mini. A half-used tube of toothpaste, enough to get you through. A small promotional can of shaving cream, or a half-bottle of saline. So what if it costs a few cents more? By the time you're done toting, you'll appreciate the weight and volume savings.

Clever Things to Bring

1. Tangible
   1. Extra credit cards. Might be a good time to take along that free credit card you got in the mail.
   2. Traveling guidebook. No more than two, one for sights, one for practicalities. In Europe, we use the Michelin Red and the Blue Guide. In America, various plus AAA. Elsewhere, probably the Rough Guide.
   3. Empty plastic bags of all sizes. (When in doubt, grab the laundry bags at better hotels.) And bring a few twist-ties.
   4. Rubber bands of many strengths and dimensions.
   5. Little bottles into which you deposit mini-allocations of things.
   6. More film than you think you can possibly use. (Bringing the extra home is trivial.)
   7. Loose foreign change saved from your last trip.
   8. Plastic coat hangers. They are durable, lightweight, make easy into-and-out-of-rental-car modules, and scarce in foreign hotel rooms.
   9. A sleeping kit from a long-haul airline. Sleeping mask, earplugs, maybe even an inflatable pillow.
   10. Two empty bags with handles, such as a tote or backpack. Squashed flat, they weigh little, and they give you so many expansion options.
   11. CD's for the rental car, because more than likely, it will have a CD player.
   12. A notebook or palmtop so you can record tidbits of information. (You can also snitch small paper pads from better hotels.)

2. Paper or intangible
   1. Minimal cash. ATM's are ubiquitous.
   2. Long distance dialing instructions. Figure out how you can make a call to the States without using local money. What are the magic access codes?
   3. Copies of your passport and airline itinerary. Put them somewhere else in your bags.
   4. Your itinerary, with as many addresses and telephone/fax numbers as you have identified.
   5. An email connection you can use from remote locations. Internet cafes are popping up all over the world.
   6. Certifications (such as a diving C-card) and prescriptions (such as for eyeglasses or a particular medicine), so you can just hand them to a foreign-speaking counter person.

Protocol

1. Try their language first. I don't care how execrable your foreign skills are, try it in their language. People who might otherwise strike attitude become instantly solicitous when confronted with your obvious handicap.
2. Get a simple phrasebook and learn the trivial phrases. (Many better guidebooks have a couple of pages of easy words.) If you learn nothing else, learn Good morning/ afternoon/ please/ thank you/ excuse me. It is always worth a smile.
3. Practice the magic phrases like no smoking room, double or king-size bed, how much is, do you have, and so on. You can mangle just about everything else but if you give them the right grab bar, they'll help you. Remember, they're used to tourists.
4. Smile. The universal peacemaker.

Getting Around

1. Rental cars are worth it. If you've driven in Boston, you can drive in Europe. And even wrong-side-of-the-road becomes manageable after one hour of abject terror.
2. Rent a cheap little car. Reserve ahead of time, using the 800 numbers for the American international companies. They will offer competitive rates and will usually not have the small-sized car you want, so you end up with a step or two upgrade.
3. Buy the best driving map you can find. The great big road atlases are well worth it, because things always go wrong. (Sometimes you will do better to buy this in your destination country.)
4. One drives, the other navigates. The driver is responsible for keeping the car on the road, managing the traffic, and reading street signs and landmarks. The navigator does everything else, including calling all intersection guesses.
5. Roundabouts are a wonderful thing. When in doubt, go around it a second time. Maybe you look silly, but isn't that worth it to make sure you pick the right spoke out?
6. Translate kilometers as miles when planning journeys. You always make worse time than you think you well, and you need the cushion.
7. Use autoroutes sparingly. They cost a fortune and blow you past everything interesting. Useful intermittently.
8. If possible, arrive in a strange town in daylight. Navigating is multiple times harder after dark.
9. In large cities, pay to park your car safely and then walk around. Parking is a local sport and they do not take kindly to interloping amateurs. You don't know the unwritten rules (like where you're safe and where you'll be towed).
10. Enlist local telephone help. Communicating in a foreign language is five times harder over the phone than in person (where you have face, writing, and spelling to help you). So, if you need a reservation tomorrow, make it by phone tonight. Go to the concierge at your hotel. Describe what you need, and ask him or her to call. They're happy to do it (some will charge your room for the call, but big deal) and you get much better information rather than being struck dumb by the first rapid-fire-slurred response you get to your halting foreign-language question.
11. Accept one-off ripoffs without becoming upset. You will occasionally be hosed for something -- five bucks for a toothbrush?! That's outrageous ?!*&. It happens. You do not have the time or language to be efficient. Take a deep breath and get on with your vacation.

Eating

1. Adjust your body clock. Get your sleeping and eating cycles onto local time. Restaurants, hotels, museums, everything will be synchronized to their cycles, not yours.
2. Sleep at the right time. If you cross a lot of time zones and need to get on the right setting, you can do it in a day, if you adopt the following shock therapy. Stay up until you get to your hotel room, then take the shortest nap possible to allow you to get back up and stay up to a normal bedtime. For example, America to Europe, you lose six hours and get to your hotel room at noon local time, 6am body time. Take a 90 minute nap and force yourself to get up. That will be enough to get you through to dinner and bedtime, and you'll be set.
3. Eat what the locals eat. Never mind that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, if you're in France, it's croissants and double black coffee.
4. Eat when the locals eat. If you can possibly manage it. (If you are in a Mediterranean country where they eat late, it is permissible to dine early if you are early in your trip.)
5. Tell them to undercook it. They overcook meat and vegetables both. Learn the phrases for crisp or rare, and specify it.
6. Light breakfasts. You're going to eat out every night, so you have to manage the calories. Any time you can eat lightly, do it.
7. Picnic or sandwich lunches with fixings bought in grocery stores save time, manage the calories, let you control when you have lunch (useful), and allow you to do lunch more quickly. The deadly sin is the two-hour Italian pasta-salad-wine-bread lunch, because by the time you arise, you're wrecked, sleepy, and the afternoon is half over.
8. Fiber. They don't know what it is. You'll have to seek it out. Learn the terms for whole-wheat bread or equivalent, or bring it with you.
9. Fruits, vegetables, bread and cereal can all be bought locally. Stay 24-48 hours ahead of your breakfast and lunch needs.
10. Smoking. They all smoke like chimneys, especially in bars and restaurants. Look for al fresco opportunities, or when making dinner reservations, learn the local phrase for No Smoking and ask for it.
11. Little dogs in France. Europeans bring pets into chic restaurants. Just accept it.

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ã Copyright 2002 David Alexander Smith