Indispensable Travel Tools

Indispensable Travel Tools

I'm taking a "French for Travelers" class, and one assignment is to bring in an object that you never go traveling without.

Well, I immediately thought of a particular knife - it's sharp and versatile, it's a good size, and it's one we can count on. We've spent enough time in vacation kitchen hell to know that you can't depend on the contents of the utensil drawer to get your food cut up. While we're at it we usually also throw in a vegetable peeler and a wine bottle opener :-)

The more I thought about it, the more I wished we could bring several items to class :-\
What else is on my "must have" list?

Well, in Costa Rica, I absolutely had to have a fan (hand held); it was most useful during non-air-conditioned bus trips and after walking into town. For our France trip, I'm not so sure. We'll have a car, and the weather will likely be cooler, but we will be walking around a lot.

Because we're on the road so long, we usually do laundry once a week. Some places don't have do-it-yourself laundromats - you hand them a bag of clothes, and they wash it. To reduce loads, and the possibility of clothes ruined by color-bleeds, I put a Shout® Color-catcher sheet in each load. I haven't seen these readily available in too many places, so I bring some along. I also make sure to explain the reason I want the piece of paper washed...

One item that is not so much a practical  luxury (more of a necessity for peace of mind), is an emergency contact and health information card, in multiple languages. It has:
My name
Emergency contacts (several names, phone numbers, countries)
Health insurance (company, phone number, policy number)
Current medications
Allergies
Blood type
Travel companion (name, relationship, phone number)

One item that our class was specifically told to not count (probably because it is so ubiquitous) is a phone/tablet. The tablet technology has definitely reduced our travel load! I remember more than one trip where we had an entire suitcase dedicated to books - now, we rely on ebooks and language apps. We always brought photos to share, and maps to navigate - again, the tablet takes care of  that.

I remember compiling our pack list for our first trip to Costa Rica - I found so many different recommendations! As time (and trips) went on, I found that what many people felt they needed to bring, I could do without or easily buy there - and simply leave behind. I've done this with clotheslines, hand towels, electric fans, cutting boards, and extra kitchenware. One time, I made the mistake of following a light-packer's advice, and didn't bring shampoo - I ended up using bar soap, and spent a good chunk of my first day of vacation looking for toiletries...

I'm very interested to see what my fellow traveling classmates consider indispensable :-)

French in Albuquerque

We're finding that the French (and francophones in general) have quite a presence in New Mexico.

We recently went to a lecture by a French New Mexican about that very thing - the presenter has been collecting family stories, pictures, and documents and adding these to histories and mysteries to form an interesting view into the past. He was an amusing and entertaining lecturer. The crowd especially smiled when he said things like "so you see, the first European in New Mexico was French!" He was referring to the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza (from Nice) that came here on the search for the Seven Cities of Gold in the early 1500's.

In the 1800's, nearly all the trappers, and most of the priests were French.

At one time, the French flag flew over New Mexico. The North Eastern quadrant was part of the Louisiana Territory, and so it was French before it became part of the USA.

Albuquerque is a relatively new city; much of the current metro area was part of a land grant owned by Elena Gallegos (and her French husband).

Now, Albuquerque has several active French groups. We just went to our first "chat" with a Meet-up group on Sunday. I attended a lecture at UNM about the Southwestern area (mainly the historic Langue d'Oc, or modern Languedoc) of France. We celebrated Quatorze Juillet (aka Bastille Day) a week ago at a party put on by the local Alliance française. And! I start two French classes this week!

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For more French family histories go to this website: NewMexicoFrenchHistory.com

~~~~ UPDATE January 2016
See this article in the ABQ Journal on the same topoc:
http://www.abqjournal.com/706544/news/the-french-a-forgotten-part-of-nms-cultural-stew.html

Options

I've always been a big fan of keeping your options open. Make a plan, but build in a divergent path and decision points. For peace of mind, this is worth it to me. But, it definitely adds a bit to the cost of doing something. Of course, if you need or want that secondary path, it saves a lot!

When we moved to Costa Rica (JulieAndRickInCostaRica), we took baby steps. There was nothing we could not undo, and undo easily. That let us free our emotions and minds to fully experience life there - it was great, and definitely the right thing for us to do.

Likewise, when we moved back to the states, we plunged in some ways, but also took it slow. We got our driver's licenses and registered our car. But we started with a 6-month lease, and rented a washer and dryer. We knew long before our 6-month decision point came that we wanted to stay longer; we went for it! We switched to a year lease, and bought our own laundry equipment :-)

And now? We have been in Albuquerque for just over a year, and only TODAY bought a REAL bed! What was our path to this bliss? We first had a *very* easily transportable bed consisting of 2 twin air mattresses, 6 footlockers, a plywood platform, and 1 king-sized foam topper. It worked well for us, but had its problems (mainly, it was a mold magnet, and had temperature control issues). Once we were sure we liked Albuquerque, we decided to try out a real mattress  - we went to a place that had a no-questions-asked return policy :-) and found a queen mattress that felt good. We gave it a good month to make sure we liked it (using our kludgey king platform), then went on the hunt for a frame. Which we got today! Yay!

Baby steps.

However, I will say that most of the time we did not end up veering from Plan A. We paid extra for the insurance of our alternate path and, in effect, let it lapse. So I have had the thought that perhaps, just perhaps, we have allowed for too many options. Maybe we need to take the plunge a bit more often...

Madrid Day Trip

We drove to Madrid! (New Mexico, not Spain) ;-)

We decided a day trip was in order, so we drove from Downtown Albuquerque along I40 East through the Tijeras pass, then North on 14 to Madrid. This took us on the Eastern side of the Sandias for a different kind of roadside view.

It was a nice quiet drive, with lots of scenic pullouts, and not very many cars.
And there were a *lot* of these*!

We went to the Mine Shaft Tavern for their green chile burger and stew (yum!)

They have a lot of live music, so I suspect we'll be back :-)

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* I think this is a kind of cholla (cactus expert that I am... not)

We left Downtown at 10:50, and were done with lunch in Madrid at 12:40. We walked just a bit (art lovers will want to walk a lot more than we did this time), and were headed back to Albuquerque on I25 by 1:15.
Next time, we'll probably just go back the way  we came instead of circling the Sandias.