I’m starting this out with a representative month each in Oaxaca, Mexico City, Chetumal, and Cuba. As we go further afield, I’ll add more exotic locales.

Recurring Fixed Monthly Expenses

Variable Expenses

This is what we’re actually spending every month on living: food, entertainment, housing, travel… A few notes about the categories.

• Artifacts = Rugs, ceramics, art… We’re not picking up souvenir trinkets, but we’re shooting for one signature piece from each destination.
• Blog = Mostly the odd developer hour necessary to solve a WordPress problem, but also things like Dall-E 2 charges and software licenses.
• Culture = Museum entrance, park admission…
• Entertainment = Music cover charges, movies, jigsaw puzzles…
• Gear = Anything that goes into our travel kit: Snorkels, sun hats, water bottles…
• Household Expenses = Anything we need to live comfortably in a new Airbnb that we intend to leave behind: saucepans, ice trays, hangers…
• Housing = The daily cost of our Airbnb, distributed monthly based on our location (not based on the month in which we incurred the expense).
  • So a month where we were in, for example, both Cuba and Chetumal, there might be 20 days of daily Cuba costs, and 10 days of daily Chetumal costs
  • This category also includes the cost of any overnight stays away from our main city. We took three overnights to different places in Chetumal, for example, which made our housing costs for that month super high.
• Shrinkage = The difference between the cash we actually have in our pockets vs. what I’ve logged as expenses, reconciled at the end of every month. It’s still money spent, whether I know where it went or not.
• Transportation = Local transportation: car rental, taxi, Uber, bus…
• Travel = The cost of getting to a given location, calculated on the same basis as the housing costs (amortized over the number of days we’re in a location, and allocated by day to the correct month).

There’s obviously a lot of noise in this data. There’s no such thing as a typical month. Cuba had a very high travel cost because we had to pay for airfare twice, and we had high Fees to pay for our tourist visas. Dining out in Cuba was expensive because cooking ingredients were so scarce we ate out more often than in other places, but groceries were very low that month. There were no Household Expenses in Oaxaca as those tend to cluster in the first month of our stay, and the month I chose as an example was month three.

Tunisia was just cheap. We had our once-in-a-lifetime Sahara tour the month after this example, so the numbers are much worse, but the baseline cost of living is just low. Our travel expenses are so low because it was cheap to get there from Morocco and we amortized the expense over a full three month stay. Housing costs were high because we took multiple road trips and double dipped on Airbnbs. We spread those housing costs across the three month visit, so they show up every month. But generally speaking, Tunisia has been one of our least expensive destinations.

All our costs in Chicago were high, because USofA. I’ve excluded the costs of setting up our apartment for the purposes of this exercise. Buying vacuum cleaners and stoves and renovating a bathroom are all one-time outlays, and I wanted to compare the same classes of cost-of-living expenses. This experiment has proven, unsurprisingly, that it’s cheaper to live outside the US. Ta-da!

I also want to note that we’re not trying to do this as cheaply as we can. This isn’t a post-college backpack-toting wanderjahr. We want to be comfortable and have as much fun as possible. We’re actually trying to spend our income. Any one of these months could have been less expensive. Less eating out. More buses, fewer taxis. Not as many day trips/overnights. Also, for reasons that shouldn’t repeat, our first year involved more stays that were shorter than our three month target, jacking our Travel expenses up. That’s why the Travel expenses for Oaxaca are so low. We spread the cost of getting to Oaxaca over almost four months, as opposed to Cuba, where we were only there for one month.

Caveat emptor. YMMV.

I realize the level of detail here might look a little… pathological. And I wouldn’t necessarily argue about that. But it’s also pretty important that we’re able to do this out of income, and not have to spend down savings to finance this folly.

On the one hand, I’ve got almost two years of data, and we’ve been under budget almost every month. So I could stop. We’ve established that we’re managing the money well, and month-to-month fluctuations still don’t push us into the red.

But there will also be situations where we really want to splurge on something: a truly precious find, or a safari, or a camel trip to a desert oasis. In those circumstances, a general understanding that we’re under budget isn’t enough; we need to know by how much cumulatively. Is there enough left over in the budget to date to pay for that safari? The answer to that question matters, and will assure that we take as big a bite out of the world as we can manage.

And I’m a little pathological.

App-based solutions are the easy part. The rest of the world primarily uses Whatsapp for phone. There’s FaceTime and Zoom for seeing and talking. Various messaging apps. Facebook, if you’re inclined. Which we’re not. Email, for those who still use it.

Which we do.

The hard part is traditional telephony. How do you continue to use your legacy phone number while outside the US, rather than forcing everyone to WhatsApp you? We found a solution, but it is, unsurprisingly, a little tricky to pull off. It starts with Google Voice.

Before we dive in, let me point out that Google Fi is not a solution. It appears to be a US-based phone plan that just lets you use your regular number and Google’s data plan while outside the US. That’s true as far as it goes, but the terms of service specifically bar you from using Google Fi full time while traveling. If you’re going to be taking occasional vacations abroad, Google Fi might be an excellent choice. But if you’re traveling as an expat, Google will cut off your service if you’re out of the US for too long. Their terms of service are intentionally vague (you must use Google Fi primarily in the US), but the interwebs are full of stories of users getting booted after anywhere from a few weeks to a few months abroad.

Google Voice, however, is a free service that forwards inbound calls to your phone. The steps to get there are, roughly:

1. Make sure your phone is unlocked, meaning that you’ve either bought it outright or fully paid the carrier’s lease
2. Port your existing phone number to Google Voice
   1. Google charges a $20 one-time fee to port your number
   2. Porting will brick your current plan, so you’ll need another plan
   3. We picked up a T-Mobile pay-as-you-go plan, which wound up being much cheaper than a traditional plan
3. Once you have the new number, setup Google Voice to forward your old number to your new number
   1. Google Voice will now ring your new number on your phone when friends call or text your old number
   2. Depending on your phone, calls and texts may appear in their native apps or in the Google Voice app
4. When you’re ready to leave the country, cancel your US plan, as you won’t be using it
5. In the Google Voice app settings, under Make & Receive Calls, select Prefer Wi-Fi and Mobile Data
   1. Google Voice will now forward to your device, rather than to your phone number, using wifi or cellular data, rather than your carrier
   2. This matters because Google Voice won’t forward to a non-US phone number if you pick up a local SIM card in your current country

But you still need a network connection when you’re away; your device still needs to be online. There’s likely to be wifi where you’re staying, but you’ll need a cellular data plan while you’re out and about.

You could, as mentioned, pick up a local SIM card in the airport when you land. That’s the sort of traditional way to manage. Of course, you may not get the best rates, and it’s a thing you have to do as soon as you land in order to be connected. Kind of a hassle.

Thankfully, there’s a solution: Global eSIMs. Basically, you buy a data only plan, which comes without any phone service (which you don’t need with Google Voice). You program the eSIM through the phone’s interface, rather than having to insert a physical SIM card.

The cost of data varies based on where you are and which service you use. I’ve found that the best all-around service, in terms of price and coverage is Airalo (based on 2022 research). They have a welter of Global, Regional, and Local offerings, all at differing amounts of data and differing periods for use (data good for one week, one month, three months…). One of those plans will be best in each specific country. We’ll do our research in advance, and have that plan enabled so our phones work the moment we’re wheels down.

By the way, the one exception I found to Airalo’s plans is Flexiroam. For some reason, their Latin America regional plan is much cheaper than Airalo’s, while pretty much every other plan is more expensive. This is clearly a space with a lot of activity, so make sure to do your research when you’re ready to go.

Call me paranoid, but I don’t want to travel with important data on my laptop. As a physical object, it just seems to be at high risk. Theft, failure, inappropriate inspection… If my laptop is stolen or damaged, replacing it means lost data.

Easy, right? Cloud storage.

But before blindly stumbling down that path, it’s important to note that there is one specific downside from moving off of dedicated, local backup to the Cloud: versioning. If I used Time Machine, for example, to back up to a USB drive, that backup would create multiple versions of any documents I created and edited, allowing me to rewind to yesterday’s version, or last week’s version. Moving to a Cloud service would eliminate that benefit. The backed up version would be the latest version, and any incremental changes I made would be gone forever.

Versioning is definitely a Pro for local backup. On the Con side, however: security. I’d be carrying all of my data with me, between laptop and backup drive, and if they were lost, stolen, or damaged, my data would be gone forever. Given that, the inability to access incremental versions is a minor inconvenience. I just don’t think I’ll be revising documents so frequently that the incremental versions matter. It’s not like I’m working and need to look at Tuesday’s version of that PowerPoint presentation to recover a slide I’d mistakenly deleted.

The other Pro of Cloud storage is that there’s no data stored locally on my computer to which a state actor might object. It’s not like I’m carrying digital contraband, but I also don’t want to be at the mercy of a border agent’s take on problematic. Better very, very, very safe than even a little bit sorry.

Cloud Storage Options

So we’ve agreed on Cloud, but that’s a strategy that begs the question: which Cloud service? The most obvious options are Microsoft’s OneDrive, Apple’s iCloud, Google Drive, or DropBox. There’s truthfully not much to pick between these services. They all offer multiple storage plans at similar prices, with similar approaches to security. There are slight differences, but they’re slight. You could pick any one of them and be fine.

One other consideration when choosing a Cloud vendor. When you use a service that can decrypt your files, they will. The Times recently reported that Google shut down the account of a woman whose nine year old son had uploaded a video of himself dancing naked. This is not a random act. Pretty much all of the services that can read your data, do. They have algorithms that scan for problematic material and automatically shut down accounts when they find it. They don’t just delete the material, they close the accounts. So if Google finds a YouTube video you’ve uploaded that they don’t like, they’ll shut down Google Drive, Mail, Sheets, everything. You’ll be completely locked out, and good luck finding a human at any of these services to explain that a mistake was made.

So my data security needs were both to protect my data from outside attacks, but also from my Cloud provider. I wound up choosing a service called pCloud. The landscape of these services is constantly changing, but as of 2022, pCloud offered the best plan in terms of price, features, and policies. I bought 2 TB of storage on their lifetime plan for a one-time payment of $350. For another $125 I purchased an additional lifetime encryption service. That, truthfully, was the feature that tipped me over to pCloud.

That extra layer of security manifests as an encrypted vault. Files I put in there have an additional layer of security, specifically a method known as Zero Knowledge. With other forms of encryption, the data is encrypted both in transit and at rest on the cloud server, by the service provider, with their keys. That means if a hacker accesses the provider’s keys, they have access to your data. If your provider receives a warrant, they can provide the key to law enforcement. So your data is pretty secure with a Cloud provider, likely more hardened against security breaches than you can make your own computer and network. But is it truly secure? No.

With Zero Knowledge encryption, the files are encrypted with a password on my side, not by the Cloud provider. So the only thing the provider ever sees is the encrypted files, and they don’t have the key to decrypt those files. No hacker can steal it from them, no warrant can force them to deliver it, and they can’t scan it looking for anything they may deem inappropriate. They simply don’t have the key.

Let’s be clear: I don’t have anything particular to hide, nor am I worried that law enforcement would have a reason to issue a warrant for my data, or would find anything incriminating if they did. But I am digitizing nearly 100% of our personal records. All of our medical records, from our entire lives. All of our financial records, legal records, personal correspondence, family pictures… You name it, it’s been scanned, filed, and shredded. So the data I’m looking to store in the Cloud is our entire lives. I want that data as secure and locked down as possible. From every form of threat.

To that end, even Cloud providers can have data failure. By storing all of my files in the Cloud I’ve both increased my security and created a single point of failure. Data loss by pCloud would be completely catastrophic to me. So, in the best tradition of belt and suspenders, my backup needs a backup.

Backing Up The Cloud

For the data that’s not in my encrypted vault on pCloud, I have no problem with it also being stored on another service. Because so many of my historic documents were created in Office, I’m going to be stuck with an annual subscription. Without it, my documents are unreadable.

Thankfully, 1 TB of Cloud storage is included on OneDrive with my annual Office subscription. That’s more than enough to back up the documents I have in pCloud that don’t warrant the extra security of being stored in pCloud’s encrypted Vault.

There’s no native way to take the documents from one Cloud service and duplicate them on another service. I could download them all from pCloud and then upload them to OneDrive. That would be slow, but it would also make me responsible for syncing the two data sets. If I modified a document in pCloud, I’d have to manually update the version on OneDrive. That’s unworkable. And the solutions that exist to backup data to multiple Cloud providers are primarily meant for corporate environments, in terms of both cost and complexity.

Thankfully, I found one service that fills the bill and is consumer oriented: MultCloud. MultCloud will take my pCloud files and replicate them to OneDrive, then keep them synced. If I add, delete, or edit documents stored in pCloud, MultCloud will update OneDrive accordingly. MultCloud has multiple plans, but I signed up for their annual plan with 1200 gigs of data for $60 (as of 2022). That’s more than enough bandwidth to do the initial replication from pCloud to OneDrive. At the end of the subscription year, I can downgrade to the free plan, which includes 5 gigs of data transfer/month. What we create while we travel will be mostly photos, but it’s still hard to imagine adding more than 5 gigs of data to pCloud in a month. The free plan should cover us nicely.

But Wait! What About VPNs?

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) offer an additional layer of security, but that additional security is likely unnecessary for most folks. Since SSL certificates became a de facto requirement, almost all websites use https, the secured version of http. That makes sure data is encrypted in transit between client and server. So if you enter your credit card information on a website, that data is being sent encrypted as long as you see the lock icon on the url.

But a VPN isn’t a bad thing. In addition to an extra layer of security, by creating an encrypted tunnel through which your internet traffic passes, it allows you to connect to a server almost anywhere in the world. So I could be in Mexico, use the VPN to connect to a US server, and log into Netflix. As far as Netflix is concerned, I’m in the US, so I can stream the same content I could when I was home. If, on the other hand, I wanted to watch Mexican Netflix, I can either shut the VPN off and use the local connection, or connect to a Mexican server via VPN, for the extra layer of security.

Most folks who consider themselves expats don’t travel full time. They simply relocate to another country. You can be a US citizen, live full time in Costa Rica or Thailand, and use your local address as your legal address. That’s completely legit.

But what if, like us, you’re going to travel full time with no fixed address? We’ve sold our home in St. Louis to hit the road, and don’t actually have a permanent address. As it turns out, that’s not OK. The US government requires that you have an actual residence. Somewhere. You don’t get to be homeless.

If you’ve explored this idea at all, I’m sure you’ve run across Commercial Mail Receiving Agencies (CMRAs). In addition to handling your mail, they promise to provide a legal street address, rather than a PO Box, that will satisfy your need to establish residence. And while it’s true that many DMVs will accept a CMRA address for your driver’s license, that address is insufficient from the federal government’s perspective to establish legal residence.

That’s because of an obscure provision of the Patriot Act, passed in 2001, that required banks to check that customers have a legal residence. One of those checks is to run your address through a list of CMRAs. And that list exists because CMRAs have to register with the Postal Service, and banks can check against that data.

Now, I’ve spoken to several people who are traveling full-time and use a CMRA to provide their legal residence address, and they said they’ve never had a problem. Good for them.

But that’s basically relying on your bank doing their job poorly to maintain access to your own money. I bank with Charles Schwab, so I called them to ask whether I could use a CMRA as my residence address. I expected to be passed around multiple agents until someone was able to answer such an obscure question, but the agent who picked up the phone knew the answer instantly.

That answer was “Hell no.” Schwab regularly monitors accounts for legal addresses, and if they find that you’re using a less than kosher address, they will freeze your funds. While you’re out of the country. With no redress except providing them with a legitimate address. That’s not a task I want to take on overseas.

So, no CMRA for us. Prior to launch I spent months managing inbound mail and converting our accounts to update us via email. Just about the only things that have to be sent snail mail at this point are absentee ballots and driver’s license renewals. In that regard, the loss of the CMRA is no big deal.

However, we still have to have a real residence to use as our legal domicile. That didn’t seem like a reasonable request of friends, so we’re using my sister’s address in Chicago. Of course, having the address is one thing. Proving it’s your actual residence is a completely different thing.

A driver’s license or state ID are the primary ways to demonstrate your residence in a particular state, but you can’t get either of those documents without proving to the DMV that you really, truly live at that address.

Every state articulates their own requirements, but proof of residence typically includes documents, which must show your full legal name and your claimed address, such as: bank statements, canceled checks, deeds, leases, utility bills, insurance policies, pay stubs, official government communications, and the like.

Obviously, some of those proofs of residence are going to be pretty hard to come by. Utility bills, deeds, government documents… But that’s the challenge, and the hoops you have to jump through to establish residence without an actual home. We’re now official Illinois residents, so it can be done.

But that’s really two completely different questions, when you break it down: How will we manage routine care, and how will we manage emergencies? Unsurprisingly, those two questions have completely different answers.

Routine Care

One option for managing routine care is to purchase a US-style insurance plan that’s good all over the globe. Those plans have deductibles, copays, and out-of-pocket maximums, just like a traditional US plan.

They also have sky high premiums. It would be at least $1,500/month for both of us to pick up coverage like this.

And we just don’t think the expense is necessary.

Chauvinistic USA-USA chanting notwithstanding, our health care system is… OK. Most other countries have both lower costs and better outcomes than we’re able to produce. So when it comes to I-sprained-my-ankle, or I-need-a-prescription-refilled, it seems like we’ll spend way less than $1,500/month between the two of us in retail routine health care. So we’ll forego any special coverage for routine care.

Emergency Care

Urgent and emergency care is another matter entirely. While the risk we take in not having insurance for routine care is that we’ll spend more on retail care than we would on insurance (as unlikely as that seems), the risk in not having adequate coverage for emergency and urgent care is a little more existential.

So we’re going full belt and suspenders on this one (a recurring theme for the obsessive planner).

First, our Medicare Advantage plan covers urgent and emergency medical care outside the US, even if we’re away 365 days/year. There’s no extra charge for that coverage over and above our basic Medicare Part B premium. That should be enough coverage, but we’ve added a policy from MedJet. In the event that one of us is hospitalized, MedJet pays to have the both of us medevaced anywhere we like.

To be fair, the primary credit card we’re using for travel, CapitalOne VentureX, provides medevac coverage, but it’s capped at $100,000/incident. That might sound like a lot, but if we’re off the beaten path at all, which is the whole point of this exercise, medevac expenses can run north of $200,000/incident. So for about $900/year for the both of us we’ve added the suspenders to our otherwise sturdy belt.

Medications

Medications have proven to be the toughest nut to crack regarding health care. I had thought we could just take a US prescription to a local doctor, explain our needs, and get a local prescription to fulfill at a local pharmacy. Having spoken to someone who lived this lifestyle for nine years, it’s not quite that simple.

The same medications aren’t available in every country, so a doctor can’t just prescribe something similar without going through a testing and evaluation process. That’s a lot more complicated than just taking a fresh prescription to the local pharmacy.

As a result, we’re going to have to rely on US medications. Our insurance company won’t authorize a year’s worth of prescriptions at once. The best we can get out of them is six months. However, there is a way to get a year’s worth of meds at once: skip the insurance. Pharmacies will pretty much fill whatever your doctor prescribes. The limitations come from what your insurance will cover.

We’re using a combination of GoodRX for prescription discounts and DiRx, an online pharmacy, for fulfillment. We can pick up a year’s worth of meds for a very reasonable cost and just skip having to worry about what our insurance covers. This works, of course, because we’re not taking anything exotic. This path might not work for everyone.

The remaining challenge is the method we use to get our annual meds. It’s not legal to ship medications from the US to another country. Does that mean we couldn’t have the meds safely FedExed? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean there’s no risk of confiscation. Likewise with someone bringing the medications to us on a visit. If they’re caught at customs with someone else’s medications, confiscation is the best possible outcome.

As of now, we may have no choice but to return to the US annually to pick up meds. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than going without. We’ll update this if we come up with a better plan.

Update

Well, it didn’t take long before our theories about health care while traveling were put to the test. Less than two weeks into our journey, I developed a kidney stone. Once I realized that it was, in fact, a kidney stone, and not the onset of my painful and protracted death, I knew I could wait it out. But not without some help on the pain management side.

Our host procured a visit to a nearby urologist that afternoon. We waited less than five minutes before being seen, and while his English was actually worse than our Spanish, Google Translate came to the rescue. I was given an ultrasound to confirm my self diagnosis and locate the stones in their narrative arc, and prescriptions for pain meds and an antibiotic, just to be careful. We took the prescription to the pharmacy around the corner, which was filled in real time.

Total elapsed time, from walking into the clinic and leaving the pharmacy with prescriptions: about half an hour. Total cost for retail, uninsured services: $30 for the office visit and $35 for the meds.

Early days, but our assumptions about forgoing insurance for routine care have so far been borne out.

So. Much. Gear.

The truth is, some of that kit will be lifesaving, and some of it will prove completely unnecessary. So rather than obsessively documenting everything we’re taking before we go, I’m going to field test the gear and use this post to share the winners. And losers. Sometimes it’s as important to know what didn’t work as what did.

So keep an eye on this post. I’ll update it as winners and losers reveal themselves.

By the way, we don’t make any money from referring products. The links below are clean, not affiliate links. We’re not influencers (no one’s given us anything), and we’re not promoting products. We’re just sharing what’s worked for us.

Winners

Salux Japanese Wash Cloth

We didn’t think this was the winner of all winners until we left ours behind in a Tunsian hotel on our Sahara road trip and had to survive the last two months on the road without one. We’d been traveling with a spare, but every little bodega in Mexico carried them, so we thought they were a universally available product. Nope.

It’s long enough to reach all the way down the back, is light as a feather, holds soap like a dream, and has an exfoliating finish. It is the Platonic ideal of wash cloths, and we will never be without one again.

Pants

Sure, don’t leave home without them. But I’m referring to specific pants: the Bluffworks Ascender Chinos. Their basic specs are great for travel: they’re light, machine washable, wrinkle and stain resistant, and comfortable. They’re available as shorts, and come in six colors. But the reason they make this list is the pockets. Ten in the chinos, nine in the shorts. Zippered, interior, exterior… They’re everywhere.

I brought a very nice sling pack. Fine, murse. It’s lightweight, is beautifully organized, and holds a ton. But unless we’re going on a day trip, I leave it at home. I can distribute all of what I need to carry for just walking about in my various pockets. Everything is super accessible, I have one less thing to manage, my valuables are all tucked away and secure, and I’m not carrying something that is an obvious theft target.

Airalo Global eSIM

Not technically gear, but essential nonetheless. More information here, but the bottom line is that we both have full coverage in 86 countries for about $10/month each. That buys us over 3gb/month of data. Is that enough? I’m using about 1.5gb/month, Dorothy even less. At 124 countries, there are places we’ll go that aren’t on the list, but there are regional and local eSIMs that will cover us. Not at $10/month, but that’s an incredible price for seamless service in 124 countries.

Portable Tote Bags

We started with different tote bags, but we’ve replaced them with the NanoBags. They’re incredibly light, less than an ounce, and fold down to almost nothing. Carrying multiples in a purse or day bag is super practical. The two we have below are 19 liters in capacity and hold up to 66 pounds. They’re made of some kind of space age nylon polymer fabric that’s super strong and super light. We’ve ordered another in XL, which holds up to 25 liters. And, not for nothing, they come in some great fabrics. These are a must have.

Cloops

Originally a Kickstarter, they’re available to civilians now. They’re rubber cable ties with magnetic ends, but they’re good for so much more. Our bathroom doesn’t have a hook for a hand towel, so Dorothy has sewn a loop into a towel, threaded a Cloop through it, and run it through the toothbrush holder. Indispensable for moving in and organizing.

Tego Tool Wraps

Tool wraps are a beautiful thing. I’m a big fan of Tego, which was also originally a Kickstarter, but there are plenty of options. We’ve brought three: one for a first aid kit (using the latest Tego version), one for a tool kit, and one Dorothy made for herself for a sewing kit. Some things are fine to just put away in drawers, but some things you want all of at once.

UPDATE We’re currently only using the tool wrap for the tool kit, having ditched the wrap for first aid. It was a little bulky and awkward for that use, so we’ve switched to small mesh bags to organize the different elements of our first aid kit.

The Tool Kit

Who wants to face the unknown without a tool kit? When we were planning, this was one of those things that seemed most likely to look unnecessary in retrospect, but has turned out to be brilliant. We’ve brought: Hammer, saw, vice grips, needle nose pliers, utility knife, flashlight, tie downs, multi-bit screwdriver, and mini screwdriver set. Which is not a complete list. A couple of weeks into our journey, and we’ve already used about half of the tools.

UPDATE We’re now no longer using any of the rollups, as we’ve reimagined the tool kit. Yes, we’ve used nearly every one of the tools we brought, but even getting the smallest version of each tool created a very heavy kit. We’ve streamlined the kit down to just this bag, replacing a ton of individual tools with the Leatherman Skeletool CX. Are the pliers as good as a pair of vice grips? Nope. But they’re good enough.

Portable Speakers

We brought a pair of Bang & Olufsen BeoSound A1s, which seemed like the sweet spot balancing weight and performance. Which made them the sour spot on price, but you get what you pay for. They sound amazing and can be paired for stereo.

We use them for TV, not just music. I connect my laptop to the TV in our apartment with an HDMI cable, power up the speakers, and we watch whatever we like through our VPN connection. We appear to be in the US, so all of our subscriptions work as before.

Water Purifier

Even if you can’t drink it from the tap, drinking water is available everywhere, right? Well, pretty right. But depending on your location, getting drinking water to your home can be pretty awkward. Water is heavy.

We had several people recommend traveling with a water purifier, and they turned out to be completely correct (shout out to Nef and Ed). We have an MSR Guardian, which removes viruses, bacteria, and protozoa from water. It’s a gravity feed, so no pumping.

It’s spendy, but it will eventually pay for itself. More than that, though, the convenience of having safe drinking water on demand is worth the price of admission.

Ikea Storage Containers

We suspected that we’d be shy of storage containers, for leftovers and such, at most of our apartments. Rather than travel with a set, we figured we’d just buy what we needed at each stop and leave them behind. That kind of plastic seems pretty cheap, and then we wouldn’t have to pack and manage storage containers.

We did that in Oaxaca, and then again in Mexico City. But in CDMX we picked up a Pruta set of containers from the local Ikea, with the same intent to leave them behind. But the variety of sizes was so convenient, and the set was so light (we’re more challenged on weight in our luggage than volume) that we decided to keep them.

Cuba was next on our list, and that’s when the decision to keep them really paid off, because containers of any kind simply weren’t available. The set has turned out to be the Swiss Army knife we didn’t know we needed.

We’ve used them as: leftover storage, mixing bowls, spice jars, cutlery holders, water jugs, ice trays, and a foot bath. In fact, they’re better ice trays than the ice trays we keep buying and leaving behind. 3/4 of an inch of filtered water in the bottom of a container, overnight in the freezer, and then popped into a ziplock (a box of ziplocks is also essential gear) and hit with a hammer to make ice cubes. Because of course we have a hammer.

We’ve used them as: leftover storage, mixing bowls, spice jars, cutlery holders, water jugs, and ice trays. In fact, they’re better ice trays than the ice trays we keep buying and leaving behind. 3/4 of an inch of filtered water in the bottom of a container, overnight in the freezer, and then popped into a ziplock (a box of ziplocks is also essential gear) and hit with a hammer to make ice cubes. Because of course we have a hammer.

I feel silly that we didn’t think of this in advance, but I’m delighted we were able to get to an Ikea in CDMX. These are indispensable.

Losers

Wine Wings

Wine Wings are padded bags specifically meant to safely stow bottles of liquor in your luggage.

The theory was sound. We brought two, and we expected to bring a couple of bottles of the local hooch with us to seed the bar at our next stop.

But it’s not like liquor is hard to find, and our bags are pretty full. We could make the room, but the weight is another matter entirely.

Voted off the island.

VPN Router

I brought a GL.iNet travel VPN router with us. My theory was that I could just plug the router into the back of the cable modem wherever we’re staying, and all of our devices would connect to a known network without having to login to the local network, and with all of the protections of the VPN.

And that’s exactly how it worked! It just seems kind of unnecessary. Our phones still need to be connected to our VPN provider, so they’re protected when we’re outside. And the hassle of connecting to the apartment’s wifi and using the VPN app on all our devices just isn’t that big a deal. It’s a very small object, but it doesn’t seem to be pulling its weight in value.

Bath Towels

We love our Onsen bath towels. So much so that we brought them with us. And there’s no question that they’re superior to whatever we might get in our rental apartments. But we brought two carry-on and three checked bags, all five stuffed to the weight limit, and we need to slim down.

So, sadly, the Onsens have been sent back to live in the States in storage until we are reunited on our eventual return. Along with the third checked bag, excess clothes, some card games, and the like. Enough stuff to make sure that there’s room left over in the other four bags that we don’t have to throw something out every time we buy something. It’s not just a lot to manage, it’s also expensive, as we’re paying for every checked bag each time we fly.

Losers That Used To Be Winners

Apple Watch

This is what I had to say early in our travels:

I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch for over three years, and love the convenience. But what makes it indispensable for travel is its integration with the Maps app on my iPhone. I set a destination in Maps, and then dump the phone in a zippered pocket. If I need to check directions, everything is displayed on my watch. As a traveler, it’s so much less obtrusive to check your watch while you’re out than to walk around with your phone in your hand. I feel more secure and much less a target. If this were the only thing the Apple Watch did, it would be worth it.

None of which has really changed. You know what changed? I got a tattoo on my left wrist, and I don’t want to cover it up. I’m willing to lose the utility of the watch in order to be a better canvas.

In theory I could keep the watch and just wear it on those occasions when the map functionality is critical. In practice, I’m probably going to sell it. My vanity knows no bounds.

Portable Monitor

This is what I had to say early in our travels:

I brought a 17″ portable ASUS monitor with us. I was pretty certain that if there was one thing in the entire kit that was stupid, this would be it. After all, we’re airbnb-ing. Where would we be that wouldn’t have a TV I could plug into?

As it turns out, our second stop in Mexico City. We even used it at our first stop, in Oaxaca. There was a TV there, and it was larger than 17″. But the image quality was way poorer than the ASUS, and we wound up sticking it in a closet.

I also use it as a second monitor on occasion. That use alone wouldn’t warrant bringing it along, but it’s definitely nice to have. It’s really useful when I’m reviewing photos for the blog.

With this and the B&O speakers, we have a fully functional home theater setup. I wouldn’t travel without it.

Every word of that is still mostly true. So what moved it from Winner to Loser? Weight. Look, would I rather watch movies on a 17″ monitor than my MacBook’s 13.4″ monitor? Silly question. Next…

But we’ve learned that we can’t travel with our luggage at full capacity, or something as simple as buying a cool pair of shoes becomes a debate over what to throw out to make room for them. Something had to go to create a little room in our bags, and this, sadly, has now been left behind.

But I will never lose the speakers. The display on my MacBook Air is excellent. It’s just smaller than the portable monitor. But laptop speakers are not excellent. Only being able to listen to music through laptop speakers is just a little too hair shirt for my taste.

Misses

• GooGone
  • We’d expected to buy a certain amount of leave-behind housewares at every stop. Things that made a multi-month stay gracious, that were cheap enough to leave behind but too bulky or heavy to take with us from stop to stop. We hadn’t accounted for how many shitty labels that would require removing from objects. A small vial of GooGone has been added to the kit.