(and the embarrassing ways she learned them)

If you are a regular reader of A Second Helping, you know that Rick and I travel about three months a year.  He loves to travel, and I love him, so we travel, a lot.  I hope you’ll learn something from the mistakes we’ve made during 25 years of international travel.

1.  Wear a money belt.

Yes, I know you are way too vigilant to ever be a victim of a pickpocket.  You carry your purse across your chest or you put your credit card in your sock or you put your wallet in your front pocket.

That’s what I said until I was relieved of my wallet in the Paris Metro.  I realized it seconds later just as I spotted the well-dressed man and woman team slip through the train doors and be swallowed by the masses in the subway station.

A Parisian police station, flanked by a laundromat and a Tobacco Shop, is not without its charms.  And a gendarme who looks like Barney Fife and types with one finger and wears his trousers hitched up to there offers bountiful writing fodder.  Nevertheless, I would have rather been with Mona Lisa at the Louvre than spend the day negotiating the French bureaucracy.  Ennuyeux!

For hands-free, worry-free shopping and touring, wear a money belt under your pants waistband where you carry your passport, credit cards, cash, contact information, and a list of your medications and itinerary.   At night, stash it in the hotel safe.

2.  Use your phone camera to mark your territory.

We hailed a cab in Beijing and told the driver the name of our hotel, in English.  He looked at us blankly.  Rick dug around his pockets, money belt, and backpack and finally unearthed a card with the hotel name written in Chinese characters.  Now we take pictures of our hotel door, street signs, and landmarks in the area.  When we get in a cab, we can just show the driver the pictures.

You won’t have trouble spotting your Marriott in downtown Toledo, but if you’re in a medieval city, like Venice or Naples, where streets are labyrinthine and inns are tucked back in dark alleys, you can wander for hours trying to spot your hotel.  You can just show a local the pictures and circumvent potential language barriers.

3.  Divide and conquer.

Imagine what it’s like to travel three days with just the clothes on your back, like my daughter and I did when the airlines lost our luggage when we flew to Mexico.  Since it was January, we had worn jeans and sweatshirts on the plane, and we had to continue wearing them in 90 degrees.  You know how miserable it is to shop for a bathing suit? Try it in a Mexican department store.  Deprimente!

You and your travel companion can work together to prevent problems.

Make two copies of your passport and list of medications and give a copy of each to your travel buddy.

Each of you can pack half of each other’s clothes in your suitcases.  Chances are, both of you won’t lose luggage, so you will have something to wear while waiting for your suitcase to be recovered.

Although airlines are doing a much better job of tracking  luggage these days, our suitcases took a different flights than we did in Austria, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Las Vegas.

4.  Pack light.

A couple weeks ago, we stayed in Venice overnight before boarding our cruise ship.  We had to lug our luggage (hence the name) over two bridges and into a water taxi to get to our cruise ship.  (By we, I mean me, because Rick had broken his collarbone right before the trip.)  I regretted every ounce of extra clothes I’d packed.

The lighter you travel, the more carefree you are.  When you go on a Rick Steves tour, there’s a certain amount of pride in having the smallest suitcase . . . I would imagine.  Once I had the biggest suitcase in our group, and I felt pretty foolish hauling it up stairs and onto trains.

Since then, we attempt to pack light.  I traveled in France for two weeks one July with only a carry-on.  Instead of carrying two dozen shirts, I carried two dozen pairs of cheap earrings and a few scarves to enjoy a little variety.  I am fussy about cleanliness, but I made sure I never smelled, washing clothes in the sink, tub, or bidet (shampoo is an alternative for detergent) or at a laundromat.  Sometimes I bring old, ready-for-Goodwill clothes and pitch them when they’re dirty, leaving room in my suitcase for souvenirs.

We have tried many different methods to economize on luggage space.  We’ve tried those plastic bags that hermetical seal (and wrinkle) your clothes into one unpliable brick. There are also mesh crates people use to sort clothes, which can also waste the corners of your suitcase.  I use the fold and roll method.

which is pictured below.  The beauty of this method is that you can see most of your clothes without moving anything.  If you are going to be in one place long enough to unpack, you can put your rolled clothes in the drawer.

5.  Buy Travel Insurance

Ten hours after my father and his partner boarded a cruise ship, my dad became ill.  He had a high temperature and pneumonia.  The next day when the ship arrived in Anchorage, an ambulance was waiting to take him to the hospital.  After three days, he was well enough to fly home.  The insurance picked up all the expenses for the transportation and the cruise, a savings of $10,000.

We have used our insurance three times.  We had to cancel a Rick Steves’ European tour and a trip to Las Vegas when my mother became ill.  When we were in San Diego visiting friends, Rick had chest pains that the hospital diagnosed as indigestion.  We weren’t convinced and decided to fly home, and it was a good thing we did, because he had a 99% blockage.  In each case we recovered all of our money after getting numerous documents signed by doctors.

I know it’s expensive.  I know you have every intention of going on this trip no matter what.  Imagine, though, losing every cent you paid for airfare and tours if there’s an emergency.

6.  Buy souvenirs at the grocery.

Seven years ago when we sold our house and downsized, we got rid of the sombrero and the Murano glass sculptures and the Russian nesting dolls and all the other tchotchkes we’d acquired on our travels. The only thing we kept were paintings we bought on the street that we watched being painted.

We have learned that there is very little that is unique or locally made.  For example, that lace we bought on the streets in Burano (the only lace we could afford in Burano) was probably made in China. Those rugs we saw in Kusadashi that were supposedly hand-woven may very well have been made by machine.  The Hummels you see in Bavaria are no better or cheaper than the ones you buy in the US.  (In fact, a German told us that Germans don’t even collect them.) And if you want a cuckoo clock, you can probably get one the Internet.  We rarely shop when we travel anymore.

Terry and Pann Webb, friends that travel a lot more than we do, shop in grocery stores for souvenirs.  They’ve bought mustard in a tube in Germany, stroopwafle in the Netherlands, coffee in Panama, paprika in Hungary, beignet mix in New Orleans, and mix for chocolate churro dip in Spain.

My mother loved potato chips, so once I brought her a grocery bag of weird flavored chips (“crisps,” the Brits call them) from London:  flavors including roast beef and peppercorn; lobster; ham and pickle; lamb and mint; haggis and cracked pepper; oyster; and Chardonnay.

7.  Don’t be ugly, American!

People are far too worried about blending in.  Your husband can wear skinny jeans and drape his sweater over his shoulders, but he won’t be mistaken for Italian.  Even if I recklessly drape a scarf around my neck and wear a beret, I won’t look French.

There is nothing inherently wrong or ugly about Americans and looking American, which is a good thing because sometimes you can’t hide it.  When we went to an upscale department store in Xi An, we were the only non-Asians, and clerks stared at us.  In the Forbidden City, my blond husband and daughter were asked repeatedly to pose for pictures with the locals.  Some teenaged boys pointed to my daughter Allison and yelled, “Lady Gaga!”  It is disconcerting, but character-building, to be a minority.

Don’t worry about looking like a tourist.  Most locals will go out of their way to come to your aid if you look lost or distressed.  My daughter and I got lost walking back to our hotel in Tokyo, and within seconds of our frequent stops to consult our map (the policeman who had given it to us said, “How is your Japanese?”), a local would stop and use the international language of finger pointing to direct us.

But Americans are ugly when they are oblivious to the local social behavior. Americans take up a lot of room and air space.  On public transportation abroad, the locals tend to be quiet (Italy is an exception), yet the ugliest of Americans gesture broadly and talk loudly.  Ugly Americans stop in the middle of busy sidewalks to consult maps, answer phones, and take selfies.

And Americans are ugly when they are judgmental.   Don’t be angry when you can’t get a washcloth in a European hotel.  Have a snack instead of complaining that nobody eats dinner in Spain until 10:00 PM.  Don’t be alarmed when your Chinese guide is a communist.  Accept that in Italy you’re expected to pay to drink water in a restaurant and to use a public toilet.  (Italians think it’s weird that we have to pay for health insurance.)

Although I think it makes more sense to bring the potty up to my bottom, than my bottom down to the potty, most of the Asian world disagrees.  When a public restroom has only squatty potties, just pull your skirt up over your head and do your business as neatly as possible.

Don’t read ulterior motives into the French reluctance to speak English; are you eager to use your imperfect French?  Or the reluctance of Chinese taxi drivers to pick you up; don’t you try to do business with English speakers?

Say to yourself, “It’s just their way.”  After all, we’re pretty stuck in our ways, too.  There’s no place like home, and that’s why you travel.

8.  Don’t let the bed bugs bite.

Jerry Springer can use DNA to determine paternity, but there is no test to confirm the origin of your bed bug infestation.  It usually takes months before these little buggers reproduce enough to make their presence known.  If you’re like Rick and me, you are not sensitive to the bites.  We never noticed itchy bumps, which often appear in a series of three (like breakfast, lunch, and dinner), but we eventually saw little spots of blood and black bug goo on our sheets.  When we lifted up our mattress at home, we found the bed bug version of a Duggar family reunion.

We think we might have brought bed bugs home from China five years ago, but they could have come from a South Carolina beach house or a Gatlinburg Chalet or a Kentucky Bed and Breakfast.  We really don’t know because we never saw them or suffered from bites when we traveled, but we tell ourselves it was China because it’s so far away;  we don’t want to think we could “catch” them again someplace close to home.

You.  Do. Not. Want. Bedbugs.

Getting rid of them is time-consuming, expensive, embarrassing, and just plain icky.  Looking back, I realize that we were very careless, and I think most travelers are . . . until they get bugged.  You may think it’s extreme, but here is what we do to prevent infestation.

We do not put our suitcases on beds, any bed.  Not a bed in a hotel or a bed at home.  Most bedbugs stay within eight feet of the bed (their buffet table), so just by doing this, the odds are in your favor.

We don’t ever bring our suitcases into our bedroom.  When we come home, we open our suitcases in the hall outside the apartment door.  We bring laundry baskets into the hall and sort the laundry there.  Then we put our suitcases in our storage unit five floors below us.  We used to spray the luggage with bed bug pesticide and put them in garbage bags before storing them, but we’ve gotten lax on this.

We typically wash and dry all our clothes when we get home, even those we haven’t worn, but if you don’t want to rewash clean clothes (or your backpack or your gloves or your coat), you can put them in the dryer for twenty minutes to kill any hitchhikers.  If you take a pillow with you on vacation, wash the pillowcase and tumble the pillow in the dryer when you get home.

I am sure many of you are rolling your eyes as you read this.  You would never be cavalier again once you’ve had bedbugs.

9.  Figure out what kind of traveler you are.

We were on a Globus tour around Germany, and we stopped at a cuckoo clock store in the middle of nowhere.  On this tour—and many other big bus tours—the guide gets a commission on the guests’ purchases.  We were stuck at that store for three hours until the last American Express card was put away.  We were also stuck in a pearl store in Kyoto and a mother-of-pearl store in Wellington and a wool store in London, all while the guides accumulated commission from our fellow travelers.

Now when we read the description of a tour, we are alert to the words, “time to shop at the ­­­­­­­­­­­­­(fill-in-the-blank) store.”  This is why we prefer tours, like Rick Steves’, where there is no group shopping time but plenty of free time when you can shop, or not.

Are you active and fit?  Are you a veteran traveler?  Do you need comforts of home?  Do you want a lot of hand-holding, or are you willing to strike out on your own?  Do you want a lot of leisure time, or do you want to go, go, go?  Do you have a strict budget?  These are all questions you should ask yourself before you book a cruise or a land tour, or plan an itinerary on your own.

10.  Take a vacation from your vacation.

Rick Steves suggests you take a break from your vacation.  It’s hard to allow yourself to do this because you know you may never get back to see that particular museum/coliseum/sheep shearing, but you will undoubtedly see some other unforgettable sight while you sip your coffee in a piazza—maybe a flash mob, as we did in Quito, or a school field trip as we did in Ravenna.  Once we saw a naked man who had painted his body green climb the statue in Piazza Navona!

Your vacation is not a job.  You are the boss and only you know how you’re feeling and what interests you.

I will continue to make stupid travel mistakes unless you tell me your travel tips!

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RECOMMENDATIONS

I do not work for Rick Steves, and I don’t get a commission for mentioning his tours multiple times in my posts.  I do recommend his European tours for active folks who don’t have physical limitations and who want free time to explore.

carry on bag.  It is durable and it expands.  I am sure I’ve used mine fifty times, and it shows absolutely no wear.

The day pack he sells is the best travel backpack I’ve ever seen.  It is lightweight, machine washable, and packable.

I also recommend a book I just read written by a couple in their late sixties who decided to sell their house and travel.  They stayed for extended periods of time in several locations (Buenos Aires, Florence, Istanbul, to name a few).  Lynne Martin wrote about seven months of their travels in Home Sweet Anywhere.  Their advice:  DON’T POSTPONE ANYTHING!

Check out this blogpost from the Blonde and Brunette Travel Blog about how to travel in luxury without breaking the bank.

Copyright © 2015 Sandy Lingo, All Rights Reserved.