Foreign Perspectives

You need to be pretty organised in packing for a last-minute mini-holiday.

The best plan is to reset the contents of your case shortly after you get home from the previous holiday. That usually amounts to just taking out all the clothing but leaving in all the essentials such as your passport, a few credit cards, driving license, electrical adaptors, and so on.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite so easily done as that if you vary your “holidays” by going on business trips as well as those will generally require a slightly different range of essentials. Likewise, if you constantly go to different countries then things like guidebooks and phrasebooks will, of course, need to be changed.

Still, the principles remain: keep the passport, driving license and at least one credit card in your case and you will probably be able to buy the rest. On the guidebook front, you can keep a very general guidebook in it too eg the Lonely Planet Western Europe guide will cover a vast range of short break holiday destinations.