Who doesn’t love a few good travel hacks?? As you know, we love to travel in lots of different ways. We enjoy cruising, backpacking, road tripping, hiking and doing all of them by carrying no more than our backpacks. So after our first hike of the Camino de Santiago, we’ve come up with some simple Camino travel hacks that helped us with our packing and overall travel comfort. Feel free to use them and amaze your fellow pilgrims! 🙂
Store Tape on Your Trekking Poles
Tape seems to come in handy on almost any hiking adventure. On the Camino, you can use electrical tape to make minor repairs to bags, ponchos, shoes and more. But don’t carrying along an entire roll. Too much weight and bulk. Simply wrap the tape around your trekking pole(s). Do it in a spiral fashion so it’s spread out along a length of your pole and not just a big bump in one spot.
Save your Ice from the Bar
If you’ve read our Camino de Santiago Packing Guide, you know that our recommendation is to bring along a reusable water bottle. Specifically invest in the HydroFlask. They keep beverages/water cold all day, even in 80/90+ degree temperatures.
But what you’ll find is ice can be hard to find, especially in the mornings when you are leaving your albergues. So what we would do was make sure to start with a full bottle of water in the morning. Then, when we stopped for a second breakfast or snack mid-morning, we would always order a Coca-Cola with ice. We’d quickly enjoy the drink and then dump the large ice cubes into our water bottles.
Ladies: Pack a Maxi Skirt
The Maxi Skirt. I think this is my favorite Camino travel hack! I was SO happy to have brought this one article of clothing along. I am all about function over fashion so it wasn’t about having “one pretty piece” or anything like that. I did tend to wear it in the evenings just because it was comfortable but had two very important functions.
- It was my everyday, post-shower attire. The showers along the Camino are fine but they are often small and not well vented. So trying to put on a full set of clothes is quite difficult and sometimes too hot. So I’d pull my maxi skirt up to function as a dress. I could leave the shower area and/or go back to my room to get dressed without any streaking! 🙂 Plus getting dressed is also much easier to do under a maxi “dress” than any towel.
- A few times I started the day by wearing my long pants and by late morning I was way too hot. Trying to find a place to change it’s always easy either. So I’d simply pull my skirt on over my long pants and change along side of the trail. No finding trees to hide behind or showing my behind either 🙂
Couples / Pairs - Carry Each Others Water Bottles
This one seems so minor but is so much more convenient for both of us. Having to try to awkwardly reach back into your pack to grab your water bottles (or snacks) is no fun. So Mark and I will carry each other’s water bottles in the outer pouches of our backpacks. Since we use HydroFlask bottles that will keep our water cold even on reallly hot days, it was no problem to have them stored on the outside. If we needed a drink, we could easily reach over to the other person’s pack to get our bottle. No need twist our arms backwards or take off our packs.
