Essentials for travelling

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Old Barrett wrote about his essentials for travelling, so I thought with this in mind I thought I would start my own list:

• The North Face Denali vest or jacket – planes tend to get overly air-conditioned and you can wake up half-way through a flight pretty damn cold. It also has a decent amout of pockets of the right size for travel documents, wallet and cell phones. Funnily enough The North Face haven’t managed to provide the same level of traveller utility in their newer designs
• Timbuk2 bag – I have a number of them; my favourite for travelling being a Yahoo!-branded laptop bag, it seems to have space like the TARDIS and  is robust enough for the most arduous travel with a pocket to securely protect my MacBook Pro
• Melatonin – take this right before you go to bed in order to crash through time zones and get up to speed fast. It is hard to find in the UK, but I got some from GNC a while ago
• Apple MacBook Pro – music centre, access to my online lifeline Twitter,my blog, Flickr and a darn fine work tool. My MacBook Pro is my constant companion
• Huawei 3G modem – very handy for the airport lounge to clear some mails and upload pictures from my camera on to flickr
• Fujifilm plug adaptors – I have waxed lyrical about these a couple of years ago, but I still think that they are most convenient, best-designed plug adaptors that I have ever come across
• Nokia phones – At the present time I use a Nokia N95 and a Nokia E90. I use the E90 primarily for email, PIM functions and checking my RSS feeds and the N95 as my voice phone. Both are well built and very reliable. The E90’s 800 pixel wide screen is unmatched by the iPhone or the Crackberry. The Nokias provides better contact sync with my Mac than their Sony Ericsson and Motorola equivalents
• Business cards – unlike most of the people I know who use Moo, mine were designed by my friends at bloodybigspider. A cardinal rule of PR when I started off was go nowhere without business cards
• Pentax DSLR – flickr is a bit of an obsessive compulsive disorder for me and my battered Pentax K100D is a constant travelling companion. It has a good reliable kit lens and takes AA batteries so if the rechargables run out I can nip into a shop and then carry on snapping
• TimeOut travel guides – with the noticable exception of Munich, TimeOut guides have served me well wherever I have gone
• Priority Pass – If I am having to do a lot of travelling I invest in a priority pass card which provides access to airport lounges all around the world and prevents you from getting a splitting migraine before you get on a flight
• Electric shaver – I don’t know about you, but part of feeling fresh is mowing the stubble down to a managable length, post-9/11 that means Braun, Remington or Philips. Airlines often do have a set of razors in business class; but they are usually some cheap Bic-disposable type set-up that is good for cuts and razor burn, but bad for your karmic balance
• Optrex – a squirt of this helps get around the damage that the desert dry air on board the plane does to your eyes

Interested to hear if anybody else has any advice for travel essentials?