Our favourite keepsakes to bring home from our travels, and the ones that just aren’t worth it!
The 5 Best Souvenirs
Fridge Magnets
OUR FAVOURITE! Small and available everywhere, we love collecting these. They’re easy to display, don’t need any level of care and attention and can be useful for pinning things to the fridge. You can see them every day and remember the good times.
Tea Towels
Light weight, practical and fairly hard wearing. Most countries will sell them and they can be used as eco-friendly gift wrap too!
Postcards
It’s not always the case nowadays that you will get hard copies of your photos, so one or two postcards from your destination serve as great scrap book or photo album entries without any effort when you get home. They are also cheap and light – perfect for situations where luggage is tight!
Consumables
Not all souvenirs need to be kept forever! If you like to share your souvenirs with friends and family when you get home, sharing some locally made food or drink can really help them get a taste of your experience without needing to go with you.
Christmas Decorations
There is something special about dusting off the decs each year and reminiscing about times gone by, so why not add your travel memories in the mix too? Most places will have a decoration or two, even if they don’t celebrate Christmas specifically.
The 5 Worst Souvenirs
Thimbles
Some of you might even have to Google what these are! If you don’t use them, please don’t buy them! Small, fragile, fiddly to dust, difficult to display… Why do it to yourself?!
Ornaments
Novelty knick-knacks and wooden animals serve one purpose only: to collect dust. They might seem twee at the time, but trust me when I say you will get home and think “what am I going to do with that”?! We still have an ugly wooden camel knocking around in a cupboard somewhere with ‘Tunisia’ plastered on the side. It is not now, nor will it ever be, on display in my house!
Keyrings
Another seemingly small and practical souvenir on the face of it, but if you’ve been to more than 3 places, you will soon realise how much these things weigh when banded together, and just how irritating they are when they clatter around in your car! If you made this rookie mistake before, you will know exactly what I am talking about and will have a draw full of them somewhere!
Mugs
Seems like a good idea in the shop (we drink loads of tea in this house, it will get used) but you wait until it’s time to get it home in one piece! If it does manage to survive baggage handling and become a staple mug, the day it breaks will be a day of heartbreak because that was your favourite and you’ll never find another one like it! Just not worth it!
T-shirts
Whether it be from a holiday or a concert, you’ll remember your first souvenir t-shirt, but where is it now? Attic? Clothes bank? Chances are you are not wearing it! It either never got used or was worn to death. You probably couldn’t still fit in it anyway. Life is full of disappointment, don’t add to it! Do yourself a favour – leave the t-shirt on the mannequin!
So there you have it! The definitive list of things worth their weight in luggage allowance and those that should stay in duty free!
What do you collect on your travels? Are you a sinner or a souvenir winner? Let us know in the comments!
Our Whimsical World 