Don't Forget to Bring These 11 Things for Extended Travel
My family is finishing up a 4-week stay in Oaxaca, Mexico. It’s been an incredible experience. As someone who had the incredible privilege of growing up around the world (I’m the daughter of two Navy veterans), travel matters deeply to me. I look forward to hopefully taking many more trips like this with my little family of four.
(In fact, we’re looking for recommendations for a trip like this in 2021 - our kids will be 5 and 7 at that time. Please leave your ideas in the comments for family-friendly spots around the world for us to set our sights on for our next big adventure!).
Extended travel is a little different than shorter trips. When you’re traveling for a weekend or a week, for example, you often bring enough clothing to last you for the full trip without needing to do laundry.
We brought some things that have made our trip easier, and there are others that we wish we had brought. Here’s our suggestions for things to bring with you for an extended trip. Most of these apply to a trip where you will generally be staying in one place (we have stayed in the same AirBnB in Oaxaca for the entire trip), and less so for a trip where you will be changing your lodging frequently.
Tote Bags: We brought a couple of these, and they have been in use most days of our trip for one thing or another (like hauling groceries or pool supplies). We like the personalized ones from Shutterfly - they’re cute but much more importantly, they are large and durable but fold down to fit easily into your pocket or bag.
Clips: We didn’t think to bring these, but our AirBnB host had a bag for us (like these). And they’ve been so useful! We use them for everything from hanging laundry to dry to holding the curtains closed in our children’s room to keep out the early morning light to closing up a halfway-finished bag of tortilla chips.
Ziploc Bags: Whether you want to put a leftover block of cheese into the refrigerator or store the pieces of a puzzle whose box is broken because your 2-year old kept standing on it, Ziploc bags are useful for so many needs. Bring yourself a box of gallon-sized ones and you’ll thank yourself later.
Collapsible Containers: We did not bring these, but I wish we had! At home, we have a couple of inexpensive sets of these from IKEA that we use for all sorts of things. They would have been easy to travel with and would have provided a place for us to keep things organized better - like a spot for produce in the kitchen, a container for my kids’ LEGOs, a spot for the above-mentioned clips when they were not in use, etc. You can bet we’ll be bringing a handful of these along next time.
Hooks: At our home in Oakland, we have hooks everywhere to hold things. I wish we had brought a few removeable ones on this trip as well - we would have used them to have a spot to hang the keys to our AirBnB, to hang up our sun hats when we were inside, and to add a spot to hang a towel in the bathroom.
Small tool set: We surprised ourselves by needing a screwdriver at two different times on this trip: once to fix a toy and once to flip the handle on a door in our AirBnB. I ended up wandering around for a few hours one morning until I found a ferretería (hardware store) so that I could purchase one. Next time, we will travel with this small set.
Memory tracking system: I try to put in a few minutes each day when we’re traveling to write down some of our favorite memories of the trip. This can be in a journal of some sort, or, in the case of this trip, it’s a stack of index cards and a pen inside a mason jar. We’ve been jotting down moments from our trip and I’m excited to look through them in the future and remember our Oaxaca adventure.
Basic medical supplies: I have a small zip bag that lives permanently in our suitcase with basic medical supplies, and it comes with us on short and long trips. It’s surprising how often it’s useful. Inside we keep things like Ziplock snack bags with a handful of different types of OTC medicines like Tums, Ibuprofen, and cough drops. It also has bandaids, a small tube of antibacterial ointment and anti-itch cream, etc. It can sometimes solve a problem completely (like a short-term headache), and at other times it just makes you more comfortable until you can get more medicine (like the onset of a cold late at night).
Laundry basket: We normally travel with a laundry bag that permanently lives in our suitcase to help keep our dirty clothes in one place to easily wash them when we get home (and the one we have compresses the laundry to make packing easier). But for an extended trip like this, I’m glad we brought this collapsible laundry basket because it’s just quicker and easier to throw laundry in each day.
No-Rinse Laundry Soap: Speaking of laundry, we figured out that it was much simpler to just wash our clothes in our kitchen sink and hang them on the porch of our AirBnB than to trek our way to a lavandería with a heavy bag of clothes. This no-rinse laundry soap made that process really simple and smelled great.
Water Filtration: This is a 2022 addition! Good friends of mine are on a year-long world trip and they swear by this Sawyer Squeeze Water Filtration System. If you are going somewhere that the water might not be ideal for what your gut is used to, this will save you a lot of trouble and bottled water purchases. We just purchased one for an upcoming long trip we are taking this summer!
What else should we be thinking about for our next extended trip? And, where should we plan to go?
