You know those articles in in-flight magazines and newspaper travel sections about the travel essentials of celebrities? Like when they list things like $400 bottles of skin toner for their in flight regimen? Or maybe their favorite and completely nonfunctional Hermès bag?
Yeah, well we know them too. And frankly, it’s about time somebody put together a list of TRULY essential travel items that may have escaped your attention.
Even better, we’ve constrained our list to things that are inexpensive, small and portable. But wait, there’s more! Each item serves multiple functional roles in your travel kit.
So without further ado, we introduce the World Wide Cubicle Top Ten Cheap Travel Essentials You Never Knew You Needed.
1. Tea Tree Oil
Tea tree oil is an amazing panacea for a wide range of skin problems. It has both antifungal and antimicrobial properties. I always bring a small bottle with me. Dab a small amount on cuts or acne and they heal extremely quickly. BTW, treating cuts quickly is essential, especially the warmer and wetter the climate gets.
2. Rubber Bands
Rubber bands have a million and one uses when traveling. Wrap them around your wallet to make it more difficult for pick pockets to remove. Or use them to create a tiny cash-only wallet for your daily spend. Keep disintegrating paperbacks and notebooks together. Temporarily attach things to a bag or backpack. I always throw 10 or 20 rubber bands in my bag and almost always end up using them.
We really like these thick, heavy rubber bands for traveling.
3. Small Rhodia Notebooks
We are a huge fan of Rhodia notebooks. The paper is awesome to write on. The pages are delicately scored and easy to remove for passing quick notes. The covers fold back and provide a solid writing surface for jotting down notes on the go. Our favorite size is the Rhodia No. 12 with staple bound top and the 5×5 grid. (We find that Rhodia sizes smaller than this lose too much space because of the staple.
The No. 11 size is great if you have small pockets or just want less stuff to carry around, but they don’t hold much information. Any size over the No. 12 gets to be too big to carry in a pocket.
4. A reliable (short) charging cable
You’re probably already carrying around too many cables and electronics. But you need at least one more: a short charging cable. Stick it in your bag as a backup in case you leave your main cable in a hotel or it meets an untimely demise. The weight is negligible and you’ll be glad you have it if you need it.
Anker makes AWESOME cables and stands behind everything they make. We love the 1 foot long cables for their portability and durability.
5. Compression socks
Hey it doesn’t matter if your 22 or 92. Compression socks make extended air travel so much more comfortable. Your legs will feel energized. Compression socks help to minimize that achy, cramped twitchy feeling too, especially important if you are jammed into an economy seat.
You don’t need the super heavy duty surgical style. I wear knee high athletic style compression socks with lots of padding. They are super comfortable walking around airports and can easily be worn all day. I tend to put them on immediately before or in the first few minutes of the first flight.
We love the Physix compression socks for travel. They are super comfortable for long haul flights without being too tight. And they are also very durable.
6. Lysterine Breath fresheners
Let’s face it. After a 15 hour plane ride, your mouth is going to feel like a petri dish in a local high school science experiment. In an ideal world, you’d be able to scrub away and remove all the scum, but frankly, brushing your teeth in the airplane lav is a kind of disgusting thought in its own right.
Enter: these super portable Listerine breath fresheners. They are tiny and pack a punch.
7. Smartmouth Mouthwash Travel Pouches
Continuing on our theme of fresh breath after traveling, these Smartmouth Mouthwash Travel Pouches are *awesome* when traveling. Smartmouth isn’t just a breath freshener — it helps to cut down and prevent bad breath by reducing volatile sulfur compounds emitted by your mouth flora.
If you are bringing these with you when traveling, first off, store them in their own Ziplock bag. They are durable but still could leak. I stick a piece of duct tape on each pouch. If you open them carefully, you can easily reseal with the duct tape and get two or three uses from a single pouch. These are TSA friendly, BTW.
8. GL.iNet GL-SFT1200 Secure Travel Router
This little travel router packs a punch for travel. Ever get tired of signing in to annoying hotel portal pages? What about hotels that have weak wifi or — egads — a wired only connection? What about backwards hotels that limit the number of devices you can connect? This router solves those problems by extending wifi networks, by creating an ad-hoc network for all your devices that only looks like one device to the hotel, and a whole bunch of other fun features. It’s easy to set up and it’s tiny, tiny size means it can just live in your bag of tech stuff.
And for the security minded, it also lets you set up on always-on VPN for your network, something that’s very handy when traveling.
Look at how cute I am!
9. Belkin Surge Protector and Outlet Strip with USB chargers
This little doodad is essential in any traveler’s bag. How many hotels have you been in that have ONE outlet, and usually in a very inconvenient place?
This Belkin Outlet Strip solves that problem by converting a single outlet into three, with surge protection. It also includes two 10 watt USB ports so you don’t clog up the available outlets charging mobile phones. Finally, and in a truly thoughtful twist, the electrical prongs can be rotated from horizontal to vertical. This is more useful than it sounds, making it easier to load up the strip with lots of heavy power breaks in the optimum configuration or accommodate outlets placed in either horizontal or vertical orientations.
10. Simethicone / Gas X
Look, people, it’s a fact. Long haul flights at high-elevation/low pressure, coupled with normal airline food, it’s a recipe for gastro-intestinal disaster.
Everyone knows it’s an unenforceable crime against humanity to “crop-dust” your fellow passengers. (Crop-dusting is the practice of walking up and down the aisle silently/not-so-silently releasing noxious gases). It’s worse than sitting in your seat cramping up.
But there’s a solution: Simethicone / Gas-X. Maybe not the best gift ever, but certainly a funny and useful one. You may never travel by air without it again.
In this day and age of point devaluation, when everybody is a frequent flyer and there are many ways to attain elite status, are mileage or segment runs even worth the agony anymore?
