It’s difficult to write much about this particular Useful Travel Item but it is so very useful!
For a few years, I owned an A5 plastic ziplock wallet. In that, I kept my important documentation – my passport, my flight confirmation, my accommodation confirmations and the paperwork for any tours I had scheduled, bus tickets I’d need to not lose until the last day of the trip etc. Just paperwork. My parents adopted this habit.
The plastic wallets were great – but they did have a tendency to split along the zip. But for Christmas last year, my mum gave me a travel pouch (it’s out of stock these days but I think it’s a variant on this design from this shop, in Large). Basically, it’s an upgrade to the plastic wallet. It’s a bit bigger, made of canvas and lined in black. It doesn’t split open and it’s very easy to find in my bag because it feels different from everything else.
I also had a personalised travel & adventures journal for Christmas (also out of stock and I can’t find anything similar) and it lives inside the pouch. I don’t use it as a journal but I do use it to write down my itinerary – every trip has a new page, with the dates and times and flight details and any tours I have planned, any other notes I need to make.
As well as the notebook, my passport and the other paperwork, I keep a handful of business cards in there – instead of tearing a scrap of paper out of something or looking for a phone with a mostly-dead battery, I like to be able to just hand over a card with my name, email, phone number and photo on it to new friends. And of course, there’s a couple of pens. It’s really only a canvas version of that plastic pouch but it feels so much roomier.
It’s such a simple thing it hardly feels worth trying to write a post about it but it’s also so important – it’s one thing I cannot leave home without.