Housekeeping While Traveling

On this sea day we won’t be doing any excursions to report. We’re just lollygagging around the ship headed for Morrocco, so I wanted to share a few disparate travel tips we have learned. Over the years of travel we have developed a few principles and techniques that may help you on your next trip.

When living out of a suitcase, things can get lost. The most important thing to keep in mind is to take as little as possible. If you take less, you simply have less to keep up with, less to lose. Since 2017, except for the World Cruise, Glenda and I have not checked any baggage at the airport. We each have a carry-on bag that we keep with us throughout the flight. I will usually take a computer briefcase as a personal item to hold my laptop, pen and pad, and any small items I may want to access during the flight. Glends’s personal item is a tote that she can easily access duiring the flight. Her travel jacket functions as her purse and holds all documents and other essential items.

I usually travel wearing a Scott-E-Vest. (I am not a stockholder in Scott-E-Vest, nor am I receiving any compensation for this article.) This garment has some 20 pockets, including some smaller pockets hidden inside larger pockets. The vest has zip-on sleeves so that it can become a jacket, an RFID pocket to prevent credit card theft, and a ton of other features for travelers. One must be mindful, though, when wearing the Scott-E-Vest. It is easy to forget which pockets are used for each item UNLESS you always put things in the same pocket. I know where my passport goes, which pocket contains my credit cards, where my glasses and sunglasses stay and where my cash lives. Each of these items always goes into the same pocket. At night I do not take these items out of my jacket to put them in a drawer. They stay in the jacket. That saves time when I dress the next morning. I don’t have to find items or transfer them from drawer to jacket.

I must confess I made one mistake this trip walking into Valetta, Malta. The town is up on a high cliff, and to get there you must ride up in an elevator. I thoughtlessly stuffed my elevator ticket in the pocket holding my glasses. It was a very windy day. When I pulled out my reading glasses, they snagged the ticket and it blew away. No harm done, though. The attendant accepted my explanation and let me on the lift anyway. It may be a good idea to put just one type of item in each pocket from now on. If more than one item is placed in a pocket or a sub-pocket, make sure nothing you withdraw can catch onto other contents. I’m always learning.

Glenda requires a bit more diversity in her wardrobe than I. She is not happy wearing the same Scot-E-Jacket/vest or Magellan travel jacket every day, even though she always uses hers instead of carrying a purse. She is, appropriately, concerned about what she calls the “cute factor,” so she travels with items in only three basic colors: black, white and blue. She also packs two scarves and a few pieces of cheap costume jewelry. With a few lightweight accesories, she can dress up any casual outfit. She also has one functional black knit suit she can dress up by adding a scarf or jewelry. She just changes accessories and wears that suit if we go to a fancy restaurant.

I, on the other hand, have a travel uniform. When I go to the airport I wear a white shirt and dark travel pants. I pack another one of each, along with underwear and socks. I wear one pair of versitile leather shoes. My Scott-E-Vest goes on top, holding glasses, passport, cash and credit cards. For dinners and fancy restaurants I take one sport coat and two neckties that go with my travel pants, and a crushable fedora. The result is that I have a travel uniform that allows me to pack as an extreme minimalist. That leaves room in my suitcase for iPhone chargers and cords, as well as medicines. For quick access during TSA inspections, a small plastic bag in the zippered pouch on the outside of my suitcase holds a few liquids. I can unzip it quickly to show the TSA agents if necessary.

On this trip we spent a week in Paris before boarding the ship, and the weather forecast predicted cold temperatures and rain. (The forecast was correct.) I also packed a sweater, gloves, and a rain/sun hat with a chin strap. I wore my wool felt fedora. My small Spirit Airlines underseat bag fit well within the airline requirements for carry-on luggage. Glenda, though not quite as severe as I am, still gets everything into a carry-on bag and one small personal item.

Another thing you can use to make traveling simpler is to use your cell phone as a travel tool. Our phones now are so smart they can handle dozens of tasks automatically. For example, if you have an app on your phone for your airline, the app may offer to copy your flight information onto your calendar. Doing this allows you to set reminders prompting you when it’s time to go to the airport, to go to your gate, etc. There are two things you need to be careful about, however. Don’t try to adjust the times of flights and events to the time zone to which you will be traveling. If you just leave your calendar alone, it will adjust the time for you when you arrive in a different time zone. When you get to your destination, all of the times for scheduled events will appear correctly in local time.

Be careful about allowing your airline app to copy your flight information to your calendar too early in your planning. Everytime there is a gate change, an airplane change, or a time change (even if it just a minute or two) in your itinerary, your airline app will send you a notice and ask if you want to copy this information to your calendar. If you agree, it will do so. The only problem is that it will not erase the previous entry, and your calendar will show multiple entries for the same flight. It takes some figuring to determine which entry is the most recent. If the date of your flight is changed, then you will see the same flight listed on different days, and that can really get confusing, especially if those flights are on opposite sides of the International Date Line. If you use your calendar, wait until the last possible moment to allow your airline app to copy your flight information to your calendar. You may prefer not to copy the information to your calendar at all, but rather consult your airline app itself for your flight information. What you see there will always be up-to-date and it will not be duplicated.

You probably already know that you can keep your boarding pass on your cell phone to reduce paper clutter. We did, however, find one boarding gate on this trip that required slipping a paper boarding pass into a tiny slot. My cell phone would not fit into the slot. Luckily I also had in hand a paper copy that worked. Boarding pass technology is changing quickly, though. When boarding the plane in Newark this trip, they used a photo-biometric system for a boarding pass. They just took my picture with a cell phone, and that was it! No boarding pass needed.

We made advance reservations to attractions using our cell phones so that we could keep all of our tickets to museums, churches, and other attractions on our cell phones. This practice saved on paper clutter, and we didn’t have to keep up with our tickets. At the Eiffel Tower, Chartres Cathedral, and several art museums, attendants just scanned the QR code from our cell phones.

Another issue related to cell phones affects the way wi-fi works. The wi-fi service onboard the aircraft is expensive and spotty, so we generally don’t use it. We hit a glitch once when I wanted to access a note on my cell phone while we were flying. The problem came when I realized that my cell phone had saved it “in the cloud,” and I had no wi-fi. If there is a note or a document you will need to access on the plane or in a foreign city where you do not have access to wi-fi, be sure to move that document from the cloud to your device before you leave for your trip. On the other hand, if you will be paying your provider for wi-fi and cellular data service in the foreign city, you may just leave all of your documents in the cloud. That might save a bit of time and trouble, Putting them physically into your cell phone, however, could save you some money, though, and it is much more reliable than accessing the cloud in a foreign city.

The same thing holds for maps you may want to use. An app called maps.me allows you to download maps so that they are physically resident on your device. Then you can use your maps for directions whether you have wi-fi or not. There is a charge for separate maps and a subscription fee. Recently Apple maps introduced this feature too; you can download maps at no charge. Be aware, though, that in a city with tall buildings around, map applications may be able to give you only your approximate location. We have used the maps on our cell phones in California before and they worked perfectly. However, we just finished a week in Paris and found the maps on our cell phone not always to be completely reliable. If you are using the maps on your cell phone, it’s good to have some idea of where you’re going, or a paper map with your known location. And, of course, always be on the lookout for signs posted on the street advising you of the direction to your destination. If the sign contradicts your cell phone map, follow the street sign.

I’m ready to nominate my wife for sainthood for the way she prepares our medicines for travel. She starts a few weeks before the trip and puts the appropriate daily doses of our morning pills and our nighttime pills in tiny little ziplock bags. These pouches go into two larger bags marked “A.M.” and “P.M.” This procedure may sound excessive to many friends, but Dr. Glenda is very careful about our medicines, and we each take half a dozen pills twice a day. Your mileage may vary.

These are just a few ideas that come to mind on this leisurely morning. Of course, if you have any specific questions, or ideas of your own about how to improve traveling, we would love to hear from you. Hope this helps.Read more