Travel tips: Essential Hand luggage

A typical overloaded passenger … is this you?

Traveling is both a joy and pain. Love the excitement, anticipation and the thrill of traveling to new places (or even the been-there ones!!!) but with all this great is the painful airplane journey we have to ‘suffer’ through to get to our final destination… since we are usually not the lucky few sitting in the first or business class seats.

I always find traveling with minimum hand luggage extremely comfortable (especially when I see others around me struggling with 2-3 pieces per person filled with those I-cannot-leave-this-behind items). Honestly guys, keep your life simple … 

Having said that … here’s my list of top 5 hand luggage essentials for any air travel (other than your travel documents of course!):

1. Book or novel – air travel usually has long waiting periods, from boarding gate to possibly delayed flights, and then the book is your best travel companion to kill time, and while most airlines now do have in-flight entertainment systems, you might still find your book a good savior from watching re-runs of “Two and a half men”
2. MP3 player with a noise cancelling headphone – any airplane to or from Pakistan is bound to have a lot of crying, screaming or just plain annoying children and their noisy parents. At best have a pair of ear plugs on hand. At that moment, this would be your only sanity saver.
3. Shawl or stole – because airplanes get really cold and you want to be comfortable while stuck in one seat for x-number of hours. The stole can be used as a blanket if the airline blanket is too thin or just not there!!  
4. A pair of socks – Research has shown that wearing flight socks can reduce the risk of developing deep vein thrombosis, or DVT, by 90%, so it is worth investing in a decent pair. Get your feet out of those uncomfortable shoes, warm them up and you can walk around the aircraft in your socks without giving you a weird look.
5. Facial wipes and lip balm – Don’t forget to pack these (even if you’re a man)! Your skin can get very dry when flying, and there is nothing worse than getting chapped lips or feeling that your hands are on the flaky side!

Hopefully, this guide will make life lot easier for you the next time you travel!!

PS – Would love for you to share your hand carry essentials too … so please share them here for me and my readers …