Unnecessary items we take abroad

It always amazes me why my wife chooses to hoard carrier bags at home. We have dozens of them in our house. Many of them stored within other carrier bags, and all squished into one big daddy carrier bag holder.

Its like were planning for a day that will never come, when well need to transport every single one of our belongings via supermarket carrier bags. If that day does dawn on us, I may well die of shame before we step out of the door!

This got me thinking about how we seemingly prepare for any eventuality when going on holiday. Even if its a luxury holiday, we always take items with us that would be found as a matter of course in any half decent hotel.

Regardless of this, we jam our cases full of things we rarely if ever will use. Even when at home, these things gather dust in the drawer of essentials. You know the one, that drawer that every person has that you can never open, that features everything but said essentials. Its normally densely populated with old relic staplers, odd foreign coins, picture hanging kits, blunt hacksaws, dirty old instruction manuals and rust riddled useless trinkets youve picked up from a flea market somewhere 25 years ago.

However, you can be rest assured that when you do use one of the dozens of unnecessary things youve taken abroad, your wifes entire philosophy will be justified and it will be you who ends up looking silly, I told you wed need this is a commonly used put down in these situations.

Travel irons get me. Especially when you arrive at your hotel and hey ho theres a perfectly good iron there waiting for you to use, so excuse me my good lady wife I told YOU theyd have one! And travel irons can be put away for years unused, but on the rare occasion a hotel doesnt have an iron for you to use and you do need it, what a surprise its next to useless and guess what theres no board anyway and you end up with the ludicrous task of ironing a t-shirt on the kitchen table.

Travel irons are merely the beginning. Most insect repellent I have used in the past seems about as unappealing to an insect as a can of coke is to a wasp. Namely, not repellent at all.

Another waste of time and precious space in my rapidly expanding case of tricks. Boxes of plasters, hoards of sun cream, cough medicine and other medical unlikelies are also conspicuous not by their absence!

Perhaps the one brilliant inclusion Ive had over the years is a fold away dirty clothes bin. It does actually fold away, and it is useful. Although of course its inclusion in the case could have been usurped by several of those pesky carrier bags, but no, they werent deemed required for this task!

Dont mention sunglasses. When one pair is required, four pairs are taken. I can guarantee you that one of those pairs wont get a wear. Unless like me you get to the last day of your holiday and take pity on a pair that havent yet had an outing. Erm, ok, thats just me.

Hand held fans are another. Why bring them? You are never going to use them by the pool. You just arent. Not unless you want ridicule, and in any case the batteries will run out after a couple of goes and who wants to take batteries abroad? My wife, thats who!

I remember once taking a packet of Duracell on holiday, opened up my case to find my clothes covered in battery acid as theyd leaked in the soaring temperatures. My fault again thoughshould have wrapped them in a carrier bag!

Dominic Speakman is the CEO atDestinology.

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Unnecessary items we take abroad is a post from A Luxury Travel Blog