After a Decade of Traveling, I Never Go Anywhere Without These 15 Items

The Larq water bottle has earned its permanent spot in my carry-on for one simple reason. I like knowing I’ll have clean water when I want it—which, on a long-haul flight, is always sooner than when the drinks cart finally staggers down the aisle. Those tiny plastic cups of lukewarm hydration do little more than taunt you, and I’ve never been the type to rely on flight attendants for survival.

What I like about the Larq, beyond its understated, smart design, is that it quietly solves a very real problem. The built-in UV-C light sterilizes both the water and the bottle itself at the touch of a button—no filters, no fuss, no mystery funk if it’s been rolling around in your backpack since last Tuesday. I’ve taken it everywhere—from layovers in Dubai to bush planes in Zambia—and never once worried about where the next drinkable sip was coming from.

The Anker Nano Power Bank earned its place in my travel kit somewhere along a misty trail in the Swiss Alps, about three hours into a hike I’d wildly underestimated. My phone—dutifully serving as a map, camera, and emergency distraction device for my son—was running on 2 percent, and the nearest outlet was roughly a gondola and two trains away. Enter the Nano: no cables, no bulk, no drama. I plugged it in right there on the side of a mountain, and five minutes later we had enough juice to find the trailhead and document a suspiciously scenic picnic.

It’s roughly the size of a lipstick tube (though I imagine far more useful at altitude), with a built-in connector that spares you the inevitable tangle of cords and adapters. It charges quickly, weighs little, and slips unnoticed into a jacket pocket or day pack.

Now I don’t board a flight—or lace up a hiking boot—without it. In an age when everything runs on battery and airports guard their outlets like state secrets, having a little extra power in your pocket feels quietly luxurious. It won’t impress the TSA, but it might just save your trip. It certainly saved mine.

Somewhere between a weeklong trip to Tokyo and a particularly muddy safari in the Serengeti, I realized that stuffing dirty laundry into plastic hotel bags was no longer cutting it. Enter the Mumi mesh laundry bag—the unsung hero of my suitcase and one of the more civilized solutions I’ve come across in a lifetime of packing, repacking, and trying not to live out of a suitcase.

It’s lightweight, breathable, and blessedly odor resistant, which means my used socks and workout shirts aren’t waging chemical warfare on the rest of my clothes. There’s a small outer pouch that holds detergent pods, socks, or—on one trip—an emergency stash of hotel sewing kits I never actually used. It even comes with a foldable hanger, so I can air things out in a hotel bathroom without looking like I’m hosting a garage sale.

The Bose QuietComfort Headphones are, quite honestly, the closest thing I’ve found to teleportation in the modern travel age. One moment, you’re seated next to a toddler enthusiastically kicking the seat back; the next, you tap “Quiet Mode” and it’s just you and Chet Baker, cruising at 35,000 feet in blissful isolation. The name doesn’t lie. They are quiet. They are comfortable. And they make air travel feel—dare I say—luxurious.

I’ve worn these on long-haul flights, cross-country trains, and once, out of sheer self-preservation, during a particularly noisy ferry ride in Thailand. The noise cancellation is borderline sorcery. You get your choice of listening modes—including a surprisingly thoughtful “Aware Mode” for when you’d like to hear just enough to function—and a wired option with an in-line mic for those odd moments when Bluetooth isn’t an option (read: every in-flight entertainment system built before 2015).

Battery life? A full 24 hours, which is longer than I’ve ever gone without sleep on a travel day. They’re not small, but neither is my need for peace. These aren’t headphones. They’re a boundary—between you and the din of the world. A bit of calm, packed neatly into your carry-on.

No matter how streamlined my packing intentions are, I always seem to return home with more than I left with. A few “couldn’t resist” souvenirs, an overachieving stack of receipts, the odd bottle of olive oil bubble-wrapped into oblivion—it adds up. And while my travel backpack is perfect for airports and transit, once I’m at my destination, the last thing I want is to lug it around like a gap-year student on day 47.

That’s where the Tumi Voyageur Just In Case Tote comes in. It’s featherlight, folds completely flat into a sleek little zip pouch, and lives in the corner of my suitcase until, inevitably, I need it. One minute, it’s invisible; the next, it’s gracefully hauling a market haul through Rome or corralling souvenirs at the airport when my carry-on taps out.

The design is clean and unfussy—structured enough to look put together and soft enough to stash anywhere. I’ve used it as a day bag, a laundry bag, and an impromptu overflow solution when my son insists on bringing home a stuffed animal the size of a small dog. It’s the ultimate contingency plan.

I used to have a drawer full of half-empty travel-size bottles—some had exploded, some had expired, all were mildly regrettable. You’d think after enough trips I’d have figured out a better system. Thankfully I discovered Ries. And suddenly I’m not playing toiletries roulette every time I pack.

These bottles are refillable, reusable, and, when the time comes, fully recyclable. They snap open easily for refilling—no funnel gymnastics required—and they don’t leak. Ever. I’ve thrown them in my Dopp kit and my son’s backpack. Not a drop. They just work—elegantly, reliably, and without turning your luggage into a sticky science experiment. I’ve got one for shampoo, one for face wash, and one for conditioner: no more hoarding hotel minis, no more crusty caps, no more single-use waste.

There’s nothing quite like the slow, sinking feeling of watching your suitcase tip the scale at the airport check-in desk—followed, of course, by the frantic shuffling of jeans from one bag to another under the gaze of unsympathetic fellow travelers. I’ve done that dance enough times to know better. These days, I travel with a digital hanging luggage scale, and it’s spared me both embarrassment and a small fortune in overweight baggage fees.

It’s compact—just 3.5 ounces—and slips easily into the side pocket of my suitcase, right next to the things I hope I don’t need but always pack anyway. It handles bags up to 110 lbs, which covers everything from a weekend carry-on to the kind of oversized luggage one packs for multi-week, multi-continent journeys (guilty). The rubberized handle is comfortable, even when you’re hoisting an overstuffed duffel, and the backlit LCD screen is easy to read whether you’re weighing bags on a dark hotel floor or in the glaring lights of the check-in queue.

It locks the reading, shuts off automatically to save the battery, and spares you the indignity of surprise fees at the worst possible moment. A small tool, yes—but one that turns chaos into control.

Every seasoned traveler learns—usually the hard way—that the wall socket is never what you think it’ll be. Somewhere between Tokyo and Tuscany, your carefully packed electronics become useless bricks unless you’ve brought the right adapter. After years of collecting a sad tangle of region-specific plugs, I finally realized the importance of traveling with a universal power adapter—this one, in particular, has quietly become indispensable.

It covers over 200 countries with four built-in plug types (US, UK, EU, AU), so unless you're heading somewhere unusually niche (looking at you, South Africa), you're covered. More impressively, it doubles as a charging hub, featuring three USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, and one universal AC outlet, all in a single compact unit. I’ve used it to charge my phone, tablet, laptop, and camera simultaneously in a tiny Paris hotel room without a single meltdown—technological or otherwise.

The Apple AirTag might be the smallest item I pack, but it’s easily the most disproportionately useful. At first, I bought a few just to track our luggage—standard travel paranoia. But it was only after slipping one discreetly into my husband’s bike bag that I truly appreciated their quiet genius.

To be clear, this isn’t just any bike. It’s probably the most expensive thing we own—excluding our home—and if it were ever lost in transit, I imagine the ensuing emotional fallout would rival that of a canceled wedding. So when his bike failed to appear on the baggage carousel in Ireland, it took roughly four seconds of panic before I opened the Find My app and saw it: sitting comfortably in a storage room two terminals away.

We retrieved it with minimal fuss and maximum smugness. Since then, AirTags have become non-negotiables. One in my suitcase, one in my son’s backpack, and yes, one tucked inside the bike bag at all times. They’re lightweight, silent, and terrifyingly accurate. No charging, no pairing drama—just peace of mind for about the price of a halfway decent airport lunch. In a world where airlines can’t always tell you where your belongings are, it’s nice to know you can.

Full disclosure here: this is my own brand. I've been traveling most of my adult life, and I never found a brand that did exactly what I needed it to. So, I started my own to make the products I wanted. This is one of them... Traveling with family means keeping track of a small nation’s worth of documents, and the Voyager PAK Family Passport Case lets me do it with some semblance of grace. Its zip closure, mesh interior pocket, and dedicated pockets for up to six passports lets you lay everything out in an organized way that makes your life easy when you're scrambling for your paper work.

Crafted from premium real leather, it holds up to six passports, has a zip mesh pocket for currency and cards, and even includes a built-in pen holder—because nothing slows down a customs line like digging through your bag for a pen that isn’t there. The secure zip closure keeps everything where it should be, and the comfortable handle makes it easy to grab and go when you're juggling children, carry-ons, and your last shred of patience. I’ve used the back pocket for boarding passes, the front for quick-access essentials, and the whole thing as a kind of in-transit command center.

The Rains Hilo Wash Bag is the kind of thing I didn’t expect to love. It’s simple—no compartments, no bells and whistles—and yet it’s the one toiletry bag I reach for every time. What sold me wasn’t just the waterproof design or the clean, structured shape. It’s that it quietly adapts to whatever I need it to be.

One trip was full of my son’s liquid medicine and a thermometer. The next it’s housing serums, sunscreen, and the kind of beauty products I swear I’ll streamline but never do. I’ve tossed in wet swimsuits, leaky eye drops, and cables in a pinch. It’s wiped clean every time and comes out looking untouched.

The material has a kind of no-nonsense durability I’ve come to rely on—resistant to smells, spills, and the general unpredictability of travel. No flimsiness, no fuss, just one reliable zip and a sense of order in the midst of whatever airport or hotel I’m navigating that week.

Packing used to mean chaos—shirts tangled with shoes, socks mysteriously migrating to corners of the suitcase, and the inevitable moment of panic at security when I couldn’t find what I swore I packed. Now, I use these Amazon packing cubes, and the entire process feels less like a scramble and more like a system.

Everything has its place: one cube for shirts, one for gym clothes, one for whatever my son decides he can’t live without that week. They stack cleanly, fit snugly in suitcases or backpacks, and don’t balloon out of shape like some of the flimsier options I’ve tried in the past. The mesh panel means I can spot what I’m looking for instantly—no need to unzip everything mid-terminal.

For something so simple, they’ve brought an impressive amount of order to my travel routine—and more than a little peace of mind.

What I like about the Oura Ring is how little space it takes up—on my finger, in my life—while doing so much in the background. I’m not someone who wants constant notifications or another screen flashing at me. This gives me the data without the drama.

I can track my sleep no matter where I am—hotel or plane—and I don’t have to think about it. It’s just on. I’ll check the app in the morning to see how much deep sleep I actually got (usually less than I thought) and use that to decide how hard I push that day. The activity tracking is a bonus—especially when I’m walking more than usual. I don’t need to wear sneakers to get my steps in; I can wander a museum or chase my son through an airport and still hit a solid step count.

Best of all, it looks like a ring, not a gadget. Clean, minimal, and subtle enough to wear with everything. I don’t think about it much—and that’s the point. It works quietly in the background, which, frankly, is how I wish most things in life operated.

There are travel accessories that promise to change your life. Then there’s the riemot Luggage Cup Holder—a simple, borderline brilliant solution to a problem every parent, coffee-lover, or perpetually overpacked traveler knows too well: the lack of a free hand.

I didn’t think I needed it until I tried it. Now, I won’t roll through an airport without it. Two front pockets hold your coffee, water, juice box—whatever's fueling the moment—while the back pocket stashes your phone, boarding pass, or passport. Everything stays in place, even when you're sprinting toward a gate with a child asking if you’re still in the airport.

It slips over most roll-aboard suitcase handles and adjusts easily with a bit of magic tape. No flopping, no slipping. And when it inevitably collects crumbs or spills (because travel), you can toss it in the wash and call it a day. Honestly, for the price, it’s one of the smartest travel purchases I’ve made.

The GoFit Cleartex Backless Booster has quickly become a staple in my travel kit—and not just because it looks better than most kids’ gear. It’s lightweight, sleek, and thoughtfully designed with a contoured ErgoBoost seat and double foam padding that actually keeps my son comfortable (and quiet) on long rides. The built-in carry handle makes it easy to transition from a rental car to an Uber, and the collapsible, dishwasher-safe cup holders are the kind of small detail that feels oddly luxurious. It even features a smooth underside to protect car seats and integrated belt guides to keep everything securely in place.

Of course, like all things in parenting, this, too, is a phase. What was once the must-have travel stroller is now the booster seat and next year, I’ll probably be sourcing something else entirely. That’s exactly why I never pay full price for gear with a six-month shelf life. I picked this one up from REBEL—open-box, unused, and nearly half the price.