7 Highly Useful Products to Travel With

Sometimes while traveling, we remember all the "essential" stuff to pack, like toothbrushes and travel adaptors, but forget the non-essential quality-of-life items. It's pretty difficult to be prepared for every situation, but you can come close with just a few more small items tossed in your travel bag.

So in this article, I'm going to list some items you may not have packed because they weren't absolutely essential but probably end up wishing you had.

Taking gorgeous vacation photos is one of our favorite pastimes, but with today's high-resolution image files and HD videos, you can quickly run out of storage space. You could upload photos to a cloud service and delete them on your device to make room, but this can be very time (and data) consuming if you're uploading RAW photos on a mobile connection.

The simplest solution is to just carry an extra SD card specifically for your vacation photos and videos. Even though smartphones typically only accept one SD card, you can get a USB OTG cable and an external card reader to mount your backup storage quickly.

We've all become a little germaphobic during the global pandemic, and that's a good thing. But constantly spritzing your hands with alcohol can dry out your skin. Despite their name, Dude Wipes are men's flushable wipes treated with aloe vera and vitamin E, so they'll keep your hands soft and bacteria-free, whether or not you're a dude.

As someone who likes to travel to tropical places, I can't stress how useful a backup pair of sandals are. Having a sandal strap break on a trail is the worst, and for a while in Hawaii, I just ran around barefoot, being all earth-child and stuff.

For the most part, though, running around unknown places barefoot is generally a bad idea. You can just get a pair of $3 sandals as backup and carry them in your bag for these situations.

Foldable bags are always useful to have, and in some places, reusable bags may actually be mandatory. Where reusable bags aren't mandatory, many supermarkets and stores have started adding charges for providing plastic or paper bags.

There are a lot of bag styles to choose from, so you might want to check out this list of great backpack alternatives for women.

If you're vacationing out in the wilderness, your cellphone reception may be a bit spotty. Maybe going off the grid was the idea of a vacation, but you still want the security of signal reception in emergencies.

Signal boosters are a great thing to have, and most of them are basically just antennas you plug into the headphone jack on your phone.

If you're traveling to some shady area where tourists should be cautious, a dummy wallet is always a good thing to have. Muggers may not immediately run off after taking your possessions, so your dummy wallet should be able to pass a quick inspection and make the mugger feel they got something of value.

Thus it's best if your dummy wallet is old and worn, contains a small amount of money, and has several things like novelty IDs or expired bank cards to make it more realistic.

Smoking is a terrible habit, and I'm not promoting smoking. That said, carrying a pack of smokes even if you're a non-smoker is a time-tested, proven social lubricant for travelers. Cigarettes are basically a currency that can be traded for untold amounts of local wisdom.

The first time I traveled to Manila, I had a couple of hours to wait at a bus stop around midnight. A young local guy came up and asked me for a cigarette, and after I gave him one, we chatted for a while, and he invited me to a local eatery and showed me how to use the local jeepney transportation system.