Things you'll want to pack the next time

The venerable Wilbur G. Landrey should occupy the post of "Foreign Editor Emeritus," for his years of work at the Times explaining why we Americans need to care about what the rest of the world is up to. (Bill probably never ended a sentence with a preposition, either.)

Both as a loyal reader and as his nominal boss when I was news editor of the A section of the paper, I learned a great deal from the man who accompanied Henry Kissinger on the "shuttle-diplomacy" jets between Arabs and Israelis and who, in earlier days, interviewed Haile Selassie as they walked among the emperor's pet lions.

But one of the lessons Bill offered to readers I failed to remember -- until I was almost finished with my recent 10-day trip to Spain.

As I drove the autopista, the 75-mile-per-hour toll road between the towns of Haro and Calahorra, I turned on the car radio for the first time in four days. All the other times I had been behind the wheel, I was intent, first on defensive driving, and then on observing the landscapes and hilltowns.

On this Saturday morning, however, I wanted some company. The problem was, everyone on the radio was speaking or singing in Spanish, which I do not.

First I realized how imitative and mediocre the popular music was; if you think Britney Spears is popular in the States, she would be THE diva in Spain.

Then I recognized that even during the news broadcasts, I could barely understand a word.

That is when I recalled Bill Landrey's simple advice to his readers: Take a shortwave radio with you when you leave the United States so you can tune in the BBC World News to find out what is happening beyond your eyes.

Wilbur, I swear I'll have that shortwave radio with me on the next trip. The bosses at CNN should be sentenced to watch their drivel for three straight hours, to see how repetitive and trivial much of it is.

Who really cares that a man in Asia was "gored by a rare dwarf buffalo before he killed it with a machete"? Yet that was on the bottom-of-screen news crawl for the hour-plus that it took me to pack my equipment and clothes before leaving my hotel in Haro.

So, what else did I forget or remember to take this time?

First, the errors:

I cannot recall how many times I have read the suggestion to take a washcloth with you to Europe. That seems petty, until you try to shower with the teensy bars of soap so favored by even good hotels. These bars are smaller than a couple of books of matches, which makes the soap hard to hold when wet.

Because of the various Spanish-language courses my sons have taken in middle and high school, we have four Spanish dictionaries at home. One is just a little thicker than, but not as long as, one of those bars of soap -- perfect pocket-size. Or it would have been perfect if it was not just Spanish-to-English and if it had enough words in it. (Of course, then it would probably be as thick as a bath-size bar.)

I also brought with me a much-handier, less-formal, phrases and glossary book that translates English to Spanish, with a simple pronunciation guide. But it, too, had a limited dictionary. Between the two books, I was, um, at a loss for words.

I own a fullsize backpack and one that is about half that wide. They both stayed home on this trip, through my forgetfulness. So I bought a cloth backpack at a huge flea market my first day in Madrid. The new acquisition can now tell the other backpacks all about Spain -- presuming they understand Spanish.

I did have some packing successes:

Because my tour of Spain would be preceded by time on a cruise ship, I had to bring enough clothing for 16 days. Of course, I couldn't pack a daily change of outfits, nor would I pay the hotels $3 to launder each piece of underwear and $6 for wash-and-wear shirts and slacks.

So once off the ship and later out of fashionable Madrid, I lived in my blue jeans as much as possible and washed underwear and socks in the sink, almost every night. (Sure, travel editing is glamorous, but I can always fall back on my hand-laundry skills if I don't catch on at the Times.)

For this trip I packed an elastic cord that has small metal hooks at either hand; it serves as a portable clothesline. It comes with a few plastic hangers whose necks fit the standard closet pole but whose "tails" are clothespins. Scrub, rinse, hang 'em up, and hope everything dries so I can take it down before I go out the next day -- to protect my modesty from the housemaids.

But for clothes I would bring home dirty, I packed a Space Bag, one of those heavy-duty plastic zip-locking bags that have a one-way vent opposite the zipping end. Put the clothes in the bag, press the grooves shut, then roll that end of the bag toward the other, and the vent lets out the extra air. This greatly reduces the space occupied in the luggage by the dirty clothes. The bags are carried in travel merchandise stores and in some local stores, such as Walgreen Drug stores.

Before driving to three cities hundreds of miles from Madrid, I hunted down what turned out to be the last Michelin map of Northern Spain to be found in St. Petersburg. It was far better than the maps I got from the Spanish government's tourist office in New York and from the Hertz desk at the Madrid airport.

Even so, daily I would find that highway numbers on the map did not match the actual signs on the roads I drove. (In tiny type on its map, Michelin warns of this.)

I photocopied several pages from various guidebooks, to remind me for what I should be looking. These pages supplemented the excellent Cadogan Guide to Northern Spain. This was the third time I have used a Cadogan book as my main reference; I find them informative, conversational and dead right.

Heeding advice we have printed several times, I planned to get my local currency -- Spain uses the Euro -- from ATMs. The bank-to-bank exchange rate is the best available, and there is no middle man to charge a commission for handing me the currency.

But in addition to my debit card, I took two credit cards, in case I was out of Euros when making a purchase. I'm glad I took two cards, because one of them failed me.

It happened when I stepped off the cruise ship in Amsterdam. I could not quickly find an ATM that didn't have a line of people waiting. So I stopped at the American Express office to take a cash advance on that card.

But the clerk refused to give me the requested money.

She had already received the authorization and had accepted my Florida's driver's license as ID. But she stopped short of handing me the money when she noticed my AmEx card had expired the previous month. (That's when I recalled receiving a new card in advance of its starting date, so I had put it on my bureau at home.)

The clerk called the authorizing number again and, I could tell from her side of the conversation, that the AmEx agent repeated that I was good for the money. Nonetheless, she refused.

For the rest of my two weeks in Europe, I relied on the second credit card I had brought. The moral: MasterCard -- Don't leave home without it.

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