After 3 Years On the Road, What’s In My Bag? (Part 3: Shoes)
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Can you imagine how easy packing would be without shoes?
Many autistic people hate wearing shoes, so deciding what shoes to pack for travel seems like a double insult!
One can dream, but in my experience of full-time traveling for four years, even the most minimalist among us probably still needs two pairs.
How do I (almost) achieve packing light? For me, it’s sneakers (comfortable walking shoes), flats, flip-flops, and slide sandals.
But if I had to narrow it further, I could get by with (1) sneakers and (2) walkable waterproof sandals.
Here’s my equation for packing travel shoes: comfort + compact + practical = best shoe options.
So what are the best travel shoes? Read on for my shoe capsule wardrobe reasons.
You can also read about which clothes and tech gear I pack as a nomad.
The Wild Card For Packing Shoes: The Weather
Before we get into my full-time nomad packing tips, let’s discuss seasons and weather.
If you’re traveling year-round in a tropical location, then lucky you — you might get away with a well-built pair of sandals. Or, you might be nomading in an icy climate, which means you’ll pack winter boots.
Packing shoes for a Europe trip is a different matter, however. Even warm climates like Italy, Albania, Turkey, Portugal, or Spain have colder, wetter weather in the winter months.
Here’s my (imperfect) solution.
1. Sneakers
I’d love to have more stylish sneakers, but (a) I wear out sneakers very fast, (b) they need to be relatively inexpensive, and © they need to be light.
Since sneakers take up the most room of anything I own, I wear them on travel days (except for a few hot days in the summer).
Scottish weather is the reason I have this pair: a tiny hole in the bottom of my shoes led to soaked socks, which led to a desperate…
