What’s one piece of travel advice you always follow?
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This is a question that has different answers depending on when you posed it to me. Please bear with me while I excavate my memory.
- Pose it to my 1960s Pius Itinerant self, and he’ll promptly point out that you always begin a hitchhike in the light of day. No nighttime excursions. Then there was the extra pair of clean underwear, the spare strings for the guitar, and the twenty under the inner sole of the right boot. I wouldn’t be a billionaire if I had them all, but I always forgot to retrieve the money at the end of the trip. There’d be thousands of smelly twenties heading off to the bank for deposit if I found them!
- My early 1970’s self was an honor student at university, was still traveling, but it was to academic meetings to present papers. He wanted to make sure that his favorite tweed jacket was packed in the suitcase. So, you take the itinerant out of the boy, but…that twenty still resided under the inner sole of the right shoe.
- By the eighties I was a government employee, starting a family and didn’t have twenty to put under the liner of either shoe. It was going for groceries – four kids eat a lot!
- Mid-90s, sigh. Out of the government, working for UPS and running two small businesses of my own. Traveling to do boat shows all over the place required that you have products, samples, signage, business cards, tools, and all the needed paraphernalia packed and ordered. Very often the family was tagging along, and all four of the kids rapidly became troupers and experts at packing. And the spare twenty? It had become a cash drawer of a few hundred for making change for cash sales at shows.
- Since COVID, it’s simple: I don’t travel much except locally in New England, and it’s mostly making sure that the car is gassed and I have the credit cards ready if needed. But while writing this post, it occurred to me that I should search that glove compartment. I’ve often stashed spare cash for gas in there and never retrieved it.
I’m rich!
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My post would have a lot in common with yours — ending with. “Only if you must”since everything I want is here.
My mom always put an extra dime in my shoe for a phone call. It was very uncomfortable moving around.
Yep. My mother was a dime-in-the-shoe type too. It’s been many years since the old pay phones were so common that you could find one almost anyplace.