Mr & Mrs – A blog of our round the world trip travelling through South America and South East Asia » Proportionally, Americans are very different…

Proportionally, Americans are very different…

Posted by Steve on March 26, 2009, at 5:41 pm | Category: Gear & Gadgets, General | Leave a comment

With great excitement Lynette & I opened our first big batch of travel clothing that we will be taking with us. You may not be aware, but it is incredibly important to take the right type of clothing – you know the quick-drying, odour-eating, mosquito-repelling, shape-retaining, long-lasting, air-breathing, fire-eating type of clothing. Otherwise you might as well be naked for all the protection that normal clothing will give you… apparently…

However you will find very quickly that travel clothing in general is (a) just not that fashionable, and (b) exceptionally expensive. Everybody will be familiar with brands such as North Face, Craghoppers & Merrell, but in our research we also found some brands that the UK might not know as well that are exceptionally highly rated – such as ExOfficio! Apparently they make awesome underpants, as well as other clothes to make life fantastically durable. They are also almost exclusively US based – with US sizes.

So as I mentioned we had a parcel arrive from UPS (after paying the £34.70 additional for VAT & taxes), all ordered from a great and very reasonable site called Sierra Trading Post (seriously, excellent pricing and everything arrived in about four days from the US to the UK!), and we nervously tried on our blindly chosen garments – which after such glowing praise from every travel forum we’d found we expected to fit like a glove…

Unfortunately, I ended up looking like MC Hammer with the red top half of a Star Trek security guard, and Lynette’s particularly worried about taking somebodies eyes out if the breeze takes a cold turn. So she definitely came out on top!