As you have no doubt guessed from our website my partner and I are well-seasoned travellers. We spend half of the year working to save money and the other half of the year we love to travel to places that are less frequented by the typical tourist. While we sometimes end up in cities and countries in which the weather can turn nasty, we don’t purposely go travelling to places where we know that we will have inclement weather.
Having said that, we don’t consider a country that has snow, and ice, and skiing, and the occasional glacier to be one that has inclement weather. There’s nothing like a skiing holiday high up on a mountain somewhere to make you feel refreshed and a lovely, tingly cold. And as they say, roasting chestnuts on the fire. The problem with going to a place of ice and snow is working out what to pack, and because of the size of the clothing, how much to pack. Cold weather means sweaters, long trousers, long underwear, ski gloves, beanie and a suitable jacket that keeps out the cold wind but doesn’t make you perspire too much.
After you have finished a day of skiing, bobsledding and generally mucking about in the snow, the evening is spent having an excellent meal in a warm restaurant and then drinks with friends in front of an open fire. So you have to pack an entirely different set of clothes for the time after the piste. I’ve always found the perfect shirt for the time spent indoors after skiing is a polo shirt. There something semi-formal about having a shirt that has got a collar and perhaps a small pocket.
Of course, most travellers tend to gravitate towards warmer climates not only because there are hot weather and beaches, but because of the clothing that you pack. You can just about get away with a backpack if you travel to south-east Asia. All you need is a pair of sandals, a couple of pairs of shorts, two or three T-shirts, maybe a polo shirt for that formal night at a nightclub.
My wife and I have travelled so much that packing our bags comes easily and naturally. When we first started travelling, we used to write out a big list and check everything off. Now we just switch to automatic and pack the bags with things that we know we need. Some of the things we packed in our first couple of trips we never used, and there’s nothing more frustrating than carrying stuff around in your bag that never sees the light of day. On most of our holidays, it’s a life of flip-flops, T-shirts or polo shirts, shorts, sunglasses, and our passport and some money. And don’t forget the camera!
