We are making note of the little things that we have found useful on a daily basis in our travels, and will give them honorable mention here, in no particular order.
A Small Roll of Duct Tape: Our roll of duct tape has been used often. With a sheet of contractor's plastic, our tape made a rainproof stroller cover so that Kathryn could be pushed around rainy Sydney. A strip of tape distinguishes our bag from all the other black duffel bags in the airport carousel. Patches of duct tape label film rolls and lens caps. Tape binds up our water-damaged Australia guidebook and more tape repairs a broken corner of our laptop case.
Ziplock Freezer Bags: We have about twenty one-gallon freezer bags. Everything that is potentially messy, doesn't like to get messy, or is simply hard to organize goes into one. With all the baby food, diapers, wipes, film, computer stuff, and paperwork we have, every bag gets used. After several drenched days walking around in and Brisbane, my wallet was getting soaked so it went into a freezer bag. My palmtop computer travels consistently in one. When our things went swimming on Fraser Island, freezer bags saved a lot of it from an expensive soaking.
A Wad of Nylon Cord: This has been handy for stringing up clotheslines in hotel rooms (in Brisbane, our hotel's laundry room charged $A1 for a mere ten minutes of machine drying) and takes up no room at all. If there is no handy place to tie the line, some duct tape stuck to a window or wall takes care of that.
My HP200LX Palmtop: We record our daily expenses in a series of separate Notes files. Every few days we enter them in a Lotus 123 spreadsheet which compares our expenses to our budget on a running basis. Pocket Quicken tracks our credit card charges so we know how much money to send home for our bills, and also serves as our checkbook register. The Phone list is consulted daily when postcards are addressed, and although we have few scheduled commitments Appointment still serves as a passable alarm clock. I use Memo to keep my journal and, in my spare moments, write the initial versions of these Travel Pages. Separate Database files organize the information I have gathered about sights I would like to see and travelers information in each country, and each roll of exposed film is recorded in another Database file so that we can decide which rolls to develop on the road and which can wait until we get home. Calculator is invaluable for converting currencies (we input the latest currency conversion rates from a recent newspaper) and metric measures to familiar pounds and gallons. When bored I get whopped at chess by EdChess, a third-party shareware program. World Time gets consulted occasionally, and, least but not least, we use acCIS, a third-party commercial program, to log on Compuserve from hotels and pay phones: the photo below was taken while collecting our email with acCIS from a pay phone in the lobby of our Sydney hotel, with an acoustic coupler strapped to the handset.
Supplex Clothes: In Taiwan and most of Australia it was hot and rained. A lot. And we got wet. A lot. Lightweight clothes made of Supplex and similar fabrics dried quickly, hung up on our makeshift clothesline. They washed quickly in the sink or shower and took up very little space in our bags.
Multi-Voltage/Multi-Tip AC Adapter: We carried a lot of consumer electronics -- CD player, mini-speakers, computer, palmtop, camcorder, etc. The aggregated AC adapter bricks were bulky and heavy. Worse, some did not accept 240v AC input. (For our unhappy experience with cheap voltage converters, see our Sydney Page.) We were able to replace most of these with a single all-purpose AC adapter that accepted 240v input, could be switched to different DC outputs (3v, 4.5v, 6v, 9v, etc.) and accepted different size and polarity tips to fit most of our toys. One of these cost about $US20 in the Australian equivalent of Radio Shack. (Do be careful to select the correct DC voltage and tip polarity for each use, as an error can quickly destroy the electronic device being used.)
American Express Card: American Express has offices in hundreds of major cities worldwide, where a cardholder can receive mail, purchase more travelers' checks, and -- most useful -- cash a personal check on his or her home bank account. The exchange rates are tolerable and there is often no commission charged for money exchange. We became especially grateful for this service when we arrived in Italy and found that our ATM card was not widely accepted there. The American Express credit card itself is not accepted as widely as VISA and Mastercard (it was always usable in better hotels and restaurants, but seldom at gas stations and smaller merchants), but it proved invaluable as an admission ticket to this global network of AMEX offices. A PIN code from American Express allows use of the cash machines found outside many AMEX offices, even when the office`itself is closed. For some reason American Express in the USA was unable to provide us with any booklet listing all the worldwide AMEX offices, but we had no problem obtaining one from the Rome AMEX office. Anyway, AMEX offices are listed in many guidebooks and there is always the local phonebook.
Automatic Teller Machine ("ATM") Card: Our other primary source of money was the trusty ATM card from our local bank. If you find an autoteller machine on the same ATM system as your bank, and you have a standard PIN (at least four-digits and all-numerical), getting local currency is as easy as at your home bank. The exchange rate is reasonable but your bank may charge a few dollars per international withdrawal. However, we found that the "Plus" ATM system which our bank used, while common in the USA, Australia, and New Zealand, was scarce in Italy where the "Cirrus" system was nearly universal. So far, we have found Plus in other European countries.
Multi-Compartment Spice Shaker: We tried to do our own cooking whenever possible. One of those clever little containers with separate compartments for several different spices (we found ours abandoned in a campground) was useful. The alternative is carting around a one pound bag of sugar and a whole box of salt bought from local grocery stores, or getting used to skulking out of every McDonalds and cafe with a fistful of little salt packets.
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